User talk:Emailismyart

Alejandro Vigilante FATHER OF E-MAIL IS MY ART
Alejandro Vigilante Sets Up Wynwood Studio, Produces Large-Scale “Email Art”

(Miami Beach, FL—April 21, 2007 Miami artist Alejandro Vigilante invites the media to his Wynwood Studio to see his newest paintings in his “Email is My Art” series. His latest creations pit Britney Spears against Paris Hilton. “What if we all say, ‘Screw Decorum’? What happens when celebrities let their hair down (or in the case of Britney Spears, shave it off), and Paris Hilton admits she’s not too smart and it’s on the evening news?” he asks. “Emails fly—between friends, enemies, former lovers and culture vultures.”

In charged exchanges between celebrities, Vigilante—the father of Email art, captures the witty side of life, which takes his mixed media works beyond pretty pictures: they are expressive and scintillating. “Many painters create beautiful compositions, as is the case when I paint abstract paintings, but I believe it is just as important for an artist to have something to say,” he remarks. “I look at what is going on in our culture and I interpret it, filtering every nuance through the lens of our times.”

Vigilante points to the interest he has drawn with this series of paintings as proof that his ideas are hitting a vital nerve, one that will garner ever-expanding attention. Along with his “live” emailing personalities, a group of paintings called “WiFi in the Afterlife” gives voice to the many iconic figures that have passed into the ethers of the unknown—those beloved and those not so beloved.

“Since the internet has come to represent such a large presence in daily life, the boundaries between the virtual and the real continue to shrink,” says the artist. “As the internet blurs the lines between what is real and what is ‘virtually’ real, the evolution of lost souls morphs into a spirited discourse with ‘the other side.’” Marilyn Monroe begs JFK to get DSL, tired of getting that dreaded busy signal when she phones due to his “dial-up” habit. Warhol chastises his protégée Basquiat for “hanging out” in Haring’s chatroom, and Elvis tells Michael Jackson, “You ain’t never caught a virus and you ain’t no friend of mine.”