GUILLERMO PÉREZ VILLALTA. Paintings 2021-2023
16 November / January 10
Fernández-Braso is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition of Guillermo Pérez Villalta (Tarifa, Cádiz, 75 years old) in our gallery. The collection of works presented is grouped under the title of “Mediterranean-ness” and the artist himself explains and develops in the text entitled “Thoughts on flight.” This writing, and all the paintings in the exhibition are collected in the catalog, digital and printed, edited and published by the gallery.
“Classicism” was the term which brings together the collection of works made by GPV between 2018 and 2020. “Mediterranean-ness” suggests the spirit and the sense of this new group of works carried out between 2021 and 2023. If GPV understood by the term " classicism those forms that remain in our taste and sense of beauty that give off; the mediterranean spirit is that which flourishes, without rules, that classicism. A flowering of spiritual, manifested through the optimism, beauty and happiness, in the form of bright, light and beautiful paintings.
If the Beauty is the supreme end, guide your way down the Pleasure and Knowledge, the latter of aspiration total, eclectic, holistic. In front of the truths totalizing, the doubt. Compared to a single way of seeing, a vision multiple. Hence the different points of view, of escape, that excite and invigorate the representations of the artist. Hence, the review carried out by the author of certain historical avant-garde movements such as Cubism. Not in the mood to study a movement that is considered closed, settled office; but as a system of representation is valid in the present and with the potential to continue evolving towards new findings and solutions.
The interest of GPV in take it a step further, to reach ever further, it is noticeable in someone who contemplates his paintings and strenuous, physically and mentally, in who performs them. This is shown by the level of complexity of the works constructed on the basis of paraboloids and inclined planes. Or those that explore the possibilities and limits of an asymmetry asymmetric. Or that link to and mix the language of the representational and the language of architecture. Probably more than in any other occasion, orders and architectural elements take on a role and dimension surprising, extraordinary. If you mentioned before Cubism, are now in the grutesco, and architectures painted their referents, although the goals are not the same.
The invention is fundamental in GPV. His work is representational, not naturalistic. His tools are the geometry and the math. If the picture is the frame of the painting, the division harmonic of the surface is the frame of the composition. The proportions, the lines, the balance, the relationships between the forms. This geometrization emphasizes the abstract character of the work, the time that the intellectualizes, the streamlines. Hence the interest of the artist in the Greek art of the archaic period.
The behavior of the geometric energy, of that impulse rationalist, however, is unpredictable. The works are displayed from the absolute complexity and dynamism to the simplicity apparent more extreme. Mannerism further exacerbated the essentialist lighter. What a deep human feeling more uplifted, sacred and spiritual. Of metaphysics pre-socratic to the neuroscience of the TWENTY-first century.
And all through a new way of painting. Increasingly free, rich, precise, complex. Using colors and tones subtle and little used today: green, purple, blue, yellow. Intermediate colors, natural, that shun the artificiosidad. And every time more essential in eliminating unnecessary elements, the narrative, so that the thoughts fly with freedom, so that the experience of Beauty-a Pleasure to be total.
Guillermo Pérez Villalta spent his childhood between La línea de La Concepción, Cádiz and Málaga, moving his family to Madrid in 1958. In 1969, he began architecture studies by dedicating himself at the same time to painting. To date he has performed over one hundred individual exhibitions in Spain and abroad.
He is considered one of the reference names within the Spanish art since the second half of the TWENTIETH century. He was granted the Scholarship of the Ministry of Culture (1975), the Juan March Foundation (1980) and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Academy of Spain in Rome (1989). Throughout his artistic career he has received several awards, among them the National Prize of plastic Arts (1985), Prize of Plastic Arts of Andalusia (1985), Medal of Andalusia (1985), Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts (2006), The Culture Prize of the Community of Madrid (2007), winner of the Tomas Francisco Prieto Medallística –awarded by the Fundación Real Home of the Currency, and the National Prize for Graphic Art (2020).
In 2023 gets the Prize AICA (Spanish Association of Art Critics) as the best Spanish artist at ARCOmadrid 2023
The exhibition opens Thursday, November 16, between 19 and 21 hours, with the presence of the artist. The exhibition may be visited by prior appointment, between days 6 and 11.