"The Musical Contest after Fragonard" Painting

Dairo Vargas is a Colombian-born, London based painter whose work explores memory, trauma, and the transformative power of the past, how what we have lived shapes, distorts, and ultimately defines who we become. Working in dialogue with the European Baroque tradition, particularly Rubens and Velázquez, Vargas builds his paintings through layers, accumulating, obscuring, and revealing in a process that mirrors memory itself. His work holds the tension between abstraction and figuration, between the weight of history and the fluid nature of the self. Works are held in private collections worldwide. Represented by Maddox Gallery, London. "If our memories give us a sense of moving through time, which of them truly define who we are and what it means to be alive?" Dairo Vargas