Oscar d’Empaire
Corp Banca. Espacio cultural. Caracas
The term assemblage is derived from the French assemblage, which means to gather together, unite. So making an art of assemblage is a sort of act of love, inasmuch as objects of different natures are fused. And just like in any human corporal relationship, things will make sense if the mixtures work. Thus the artist of assemblage arises as a magnificent alchemist that processes wastes to turn them into art.
Oscar d’Empaire (Maracaibo, 1930) recreates the poetics of abandoned objects, collected by the artist and then transformed into art. He creates a new world on the basis of another deprecated one.
In this rescuing of things he feeds the sensorial and the everyday quality. Also the habitual universal affairs: music, the ludic, the artisanal or the professional, sometimes in a sort of current reminder of the vanitas of the past and the inevitable presence of death. Others, he manifests it with a touch of irony – which is reflected in the titles of his works. In any way he highlights an element: the cobbler’s wooden shoetree, as a human sign.
It is a permanence of the everyday where things acquire obsolescence at great speed. Then everyday things become wastes. These pieces include many elements that were not conceived, originally, as artistic objects, which were transformed by the artist. There is association instead of dissociation. It is an “aesthetics of accumulation” in which d’Empaire always reinvents himself. He incorporates valuations of the void in the synthesis of the work. In this way, the pieces not only have a formal significance, but also an iconographic and a dynamic one.
The viewer must decipher each piece, either through its title or its components. He/she can interact in a sensorial way with some of them and find antiques or objects of the memorabilia within them.
Eros arises from chaos. The maker of assemblages creates his own universal imaginary. And makes the possible to be born from the impossible. They are absurd volumes, but also necessary utopias. They tell us about the joy with which they were made by a visionary, and that art can also be reborn from wastes.
