171 GALLERY is pleased to welcome Leonardo Vargas to its program and to present Essays on Imperfection, the artist's debut exhibition with the gallery.
Bringing together two bodies of work produced at different moments in Vargas's career, Essays on Imperfection offers a broad perspective on an artistic practice dedicated, in this instance, to exploring the nature and instability of the photographic image. Situated at the intersection of painting and photography, the exhibition reveals a sustained investigation into how images are shaped by memory, materiality, and time. Rather than presenting photography as a fixed record of reality, Vargas approaches it as a mutable surface—one that is continuously transformed through the language of paint.
Vargas's practice is distinguished by a deeply painterly engagement with photographic sources, amongst other visual material. Drawing equally from nineteenth-century daguerreotypes and contemporary fashion imagery, he detaches these images from their original historical and cultural contexts, allowing them to become starting points for new visual narratives. Across his work, painting functions not as a means of reproducing photographs but of questioning their authority, dissolving the boundaries between documentation, recollection, and invention.
Portraiture occupies a central place within Vargas's visual language. Faces emerge through translucent layers of pigment before receding beneath gestures of erasure, abrasion, and overpainting, creating figures that seem suspended between presence and absence. Identity remains deliberately unresolved. Rather than depicting individual subjects, Vargas evokes the fragile and shifting ways in which images persist in memory, where recognition is continually interrupted by forgetting, distortion, and transformation.
Imperfection lies at the heart of Vargas's artistic inquiry. Blur, interruption, material disruption, and painterly accident are embraced not as flaws but as essential conditions of representation. Through delicate glazes, gestural marks, and accumulated surfaces, his paintings reveal images in a constant state of becoming, resisting the certainty and apparent transparency traditionally associated with photography. The physical presence of paint becomes inseparable from the conceptual questions the works pose, allowing each image to exist simultaneously as object, memory, and process.
At the core of Vargas's practice is an exploration of how images acquire, lose, and regenerate meaning over time. His paintings resist definitive interpretation, inviting viewers into contemplative encounters where representation remains open, unstable, and profoundly human. Through Essays on Imperfection, Vargas proposes painting as a space in which the life of images can be reconsidered—affirming uncertainty, material presence, and the expressive potential of imperfection in an increasingly seamless visual culture.
171 GALLERY is proud to welcome Leonardo Vargas and looks forward to presenting his distinctive artistic voice as part of the gallery's evolving program.
