I S A B E L V I L L A R
“That other forest within the forest”
Paintings 2019-2021
The art gallery Fernández-Braso presents an exhibition dedicated to the latest paintings by Isabel Villar (Salamanca, 1934) made in his studio in Madrid between 2019 and 2021. This exhibition complements the retrospective held at the gallery in 2018, curated by Alberto Anaut; and it happens to the participation of Isabel Villar in the exhibition “Collection XX: History of Art,” held in 2020 at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) of the Community of Madrid.
Isabel Villar meet 87-year-old the next day, march 8, and we wanted to join in the celebration by organizing this exhibition and editing a new catalogue on the artist, a publication that will bring together the works of participants, and two new texts about his work and his painting.
Estrella de Diego, professor of Art History and a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando, outlines a genealogy through partnerships and referrals to artists throughout the History of Art have been imagined and created landscapes and worlds as unique and personal as the Isabel Villar, animated angels, girls, women and animals; evocative of feelings and desires and the loneliness, the happiness, the beauty, the harmony, the feminine ideal, the freedom, the immortality... Star Diego points out that “often the teachers have been traspapelado of the narrative, especially when the glossary is complex to classify, when it's difficult to find a comfortable place in the story, which many in search for its alternative path”. How easy it would be to fall on the face of it, but “Villar puts traps in the eyes because he is a painter of strategies, which build up your method, with great care, and, most importantly, accurately. Villar is relentless so accurate. This is called finding the style.”
The second text, the title of which gives its name to the exhibition, signed by the writer and editor Sabina Urraca, author of “The girls wonder” (2017) and “Dreamt with a girl who stole a horse” (Editorial Lengua de Trapo, forthcoming). Sabina writes a story that complements the works of Isabel Villar, an autonomous text that reveals the landscape ambiguous, emotional, and symbolic shared by both creators. “It's too much of the beauty that draws the mildew on the rocks, the sound of liquid water that hits persistently in an old stone. But that is precisely what it takes to guess that behind the foliage, pine trees, olive trees, wild and the poplars that compliment the water, the chirping crazed of the thrushes, there is something more. Something that's happening underneath all of that, or interlaced with all of that, and is not allowed to be seen. An invisible world that, however, is.”
Isabel Villar has been shown individually and continued his work in galleries, museums and art centres from 1958 to the present. This latest solo exhibition is roughly the number seventy, the sixth, conducted by the family Fernández-Braso.
The exhibition opens to the public on the 4th of march, with the presence of the artist.
Ends may 14.