Born in Mieres, Vergara emigrated to Belgium at the age of six with his family, and it was there that he built his career, becoming one of the most important figures on Belgium's contemporary art scene. He represented the country at the 2011 Venice Biennale, where his installation Los siete pecados capitales (The Seven Deadly Sins) was shown under the ironic, protest-tinged title Feuilleton.

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Vergara's practice moves fluidly between painting, performance, video art, drawing, and installation. Central to his work is his alter ego Straatman ("man of the street" in Flemish), through whom Vergara covers his body in a white sheet to paint, draw, and sketch in public space,  attuned to the blurred shapes, conversations, sounds, smells, and shifting light of the cities he visits, from Hong Kong and New York to Paris, Brussels, and beyond. Through Straatman, Vergara reflects on the tension between public and private, and on the function of the artist within the city itself.

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Writing in the catalogue for Dans l'Instant (Musée Grand Hornu, 2023), critic Bert Puype placed Vergara in a lineage running from James Ensor through René Magritte to Marcel Broodthaers, pointing to his sharp yet gentle sense of the absurd and his poetic humor in the face of an often hostile, ever-changing world. Since the 1980s, Vergara has worked to break free of the art world's systematic constraints, applying his interdisciplinary approach, heir to the avant-garde,  to a sustained social and political commitment.

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His exhibitions include the MACS Musée des Arts Contemporains Grand-Hornu (Belgium); the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels; the Watari Museum, Tokyo; the Fribourg Kunsthalle, Switzerland; the Berardo Museum, Lisbon; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires, among others.