Pérez Villalta, geometry against vertigo

Madrid,

The fifth individual exhibition that the Fernández-Braso gallery dedicates to Guillermo Pérez Villalta can be visited until January in its rooms and brings together works in which the Cadiz artist has worked in the last two years; His basic ideas were first noted in drawings, a medium to which, on this occasion, a separate space is dedicated in the exhibition, with the name of Ideas Cabinet.

It is actually a common method for this author to make small notes of his births; In some cases, he lets them marinate for a while to gauge their value; other times, in the author’s expression, they remained in the limbo of what was not realized.

Those thoughts that did find their channel did so through the union of iconography and memory, in thematic, and geometry in its form; He conceives the latter as a railing against the vertigo of emptiness. This process has something random; Pérez Villalta points out in the catalogue: I choose a shape and a grid, I leave the movement of the imagination to its own devices. I could say it’s my favorite game. Drawing is the best way to bring to reality what can be contemplated by everyone what is thought alone, that only one’s head knows. It is a surprise, for myself the first, to see what has come out when putting on paper what was previously only in thought.

These latest works of the artist must be understood from a will that has remained constant throughout his career: that of creating beauty from thought (first) and form (later). The first provides non-visible concepts, the second supposes the visual materialization of these notions and geometry establishes relationships between these forms. According to this author, from our earliest observations of nature, we need geometry to see, to understand the measurement of things.

Guillermo Pérez Villalta. Paintings 2023-2025. Fernández-Braso Gallery

He knows and demonstrates that where the systems of proportions mediate we find balance and calm: his creations are far from the shadows and respond to the conviction that the sense of beauty is a permanent cause for our species. Since in the Neolithic the flint tools used for butchering were carved with polished symmetry, not to be more useful, but more beautiful.

Speaking of tools, his eye very often attends to simple objects and architectures, with the capacity to unexpectedly move us if we are able to contemplate them with a gaze open to wonder. Even in the theoretically rare he sees options to find joy.

Classicism, the sea and a spirituality understood in a very open sense come our way in the works now gathered in Fernández-Braso. We will contemplate works close to abstraction: the space constructed from crystalline facets of Crystalline; conjunctions of triangles and circles that suggest meditation and strangeness; spirals of existence or diagonal encounters of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.

Pérez Villalta has even created temples of organization based on squares, circles and triangles; refined and almost conventual places for thought with a triangle, a niche and a circle; landscapes based on the conjunction of planes or curved lines. And his usual allegories: a person tied to a column embodies subjectivity; the two twins that make up a face, empathy; a floral and anthropomorphic vase announces the thought; a brain like a large chromatic hole and with two eyes, perception; or the solid and the evanescent, knowledge and intuition.

His interest in the polarity of the masculine and the feminine returns in Gender or masculine and feminine identityand has continued to address religious issues with classical references and a deeply modern purification: in The Dormition of the Virgin, The Flight into Egypt or the perfectly abstract Annunciation.

Cézanne’s first cubes and Mondrian’s lines that ordered primary colors coexist in Cézanne-Mondrian Landscapeand there will also be space for friezes: the human and the architectural merge in The sense of the imaginary and the geometric or in Frieze of individualities; and mythology clearly inspires Athena and Poseidon dispute over the acropolis.

That hybridization between skin and stone will be repeated in Offering of a god to two goddesses either Conversation between two academieswhich also supposes the encounter between two subjectivities.

Pérez Villalta has stressed the importance of touch the beauty (2023), a panel that represents the first encounter with that concept, which he first found, in his childhood, in the sound of a toy piano. Afterwards at the Malaga Cathedral: My longing gaze looked everywhere. Keep doing it.