SUSAN VARGAS

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 “Susan Vargas develops a very personal idiom that ends up being universal in its origins, combining playfully and strongly while at the same time concentrating on European trends with the art of Cyprus and Latin America, where she comes from.

In her appliqués, with the upright or inverted human figures, the limbs ending in autonomous existences, as floating palms or as inverted feet sinking into the water, with bulls and lions, fish and crocodiles, owls, eagles, hawks and all manner of flying and aquatic creatures, her landscapes and flower portraits function as a ritual eulogy to a universe, seen differently. Her paintings with the tiny people moving like puppets between tall buildings of big cities, manipulated, as it were, by evil forces, with the skulls and carcasses of animals next to the Crucified, with the Tower of Babel and the saving Ark of Noah, with human bodies bent and heads wedged in glasses, they constitute an elegy to life and death, to the suffocating loneliness one experiences when the psyche literally suffocates in conditions of isolation, among the crowd. Her work is raised as a cry of supplication that seeks release from dream-memories-nightmares and the comforting resurrection-elevation that the universe emits through the fluttering of a bird or the gentle touch of a cat.”

 Art Theoretician Dr Nadia Anaxagorou 

 Susan Vargas was born in Bogotá, Colombia in 1963. From 1982 – 1986 she studied art in Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, GA., USA and in Florence, Italy. In 1987 she studied at the Hocshule fur Angewendete Kunst in Vienna, Austria. From 1988 to 1989 she did experimental theatre and video art at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. During 1989 – 1990 she did a postgraduate course in art at the Cyprus College of Art.

In 1990 she started the “Praxis & Installations” with Rinos Stefani. In 1994 she participated in the Pan-Hellenic Art Symposium at the Famagusta Gate in Nicosia. In 1995 she did the installation “Road of Bread” in Apocalypse gallery, Nicosia. She participated in the installation “Sphere” 1998 and “SeaNet” 2000, both in the Akamas peninsula, Cyprus. In 1999 she represented Cyprus in the art project “Sail colony” in Samos Island and Thessalonica, Greece.

She has had 7 solo exhibitions and participated in many group shows in Cyprus, Greece, Colombia, and the USA.

Vanitas

The word is the latin for Vanity meaning pointlessness, or futility, and its a genre of art which uses symbolism to show the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death, and thus the vanity of ambition and all worldly desires. 

In this exhibition Susan Vargas makes her interpretation of Vanitas through her fabric Appliques and oil paintings.

embroidered textual scapes, delves into the themes of the Mediterranean Sea and the art of embroidery.

This visual concept is a seamless extension of  the “textual nets” series, inspired by winning the first prize in the recent gift competition of the House of Representatives of the Republic of Cyprus. 

Exploring an art form once marginalized within the hierarchical confines of patriarchal dominance in Handicrafts, Vasiloude unveils the unspoken female discourse within. Her artistic practice, merging printmaking techniques with a prayer-like symbolic process, crafts an experience both manual and spiritual.

Through deliberate touch and the ritualistic act of printing, “thinking” hands create an art “scape” that becomes a conduit for the value of community. The artwork weaves tales—old and new—exploring ideas of kinship and symbiosis, not just among humans but also among non-human entities. These sacks and bundles expand the boundaries of thought, fostering environments of co-creation and inclusion, encapsulating collectiveness, memory, and ecology.