ANARCHIVES
A work is inseparable from its history and everything that surrounds it.
Between the done and the to-come – between archive and production – the distinction, so clear at first sight, sometimes becomes blurred if one looks at it more closely. Because an archive – revisited , reformulated – becomes œuvre, day after day. It is not a closed and static corpus, external to the work, but – spider’s belly – what feeds it. Updated at every step of the way, perpetually mobile and malleable, transformable at will, it hence resists archiving itself...
In other words: these anarchives are a pale attempt to tidy up Villani’s drawers, to better follow what he will deposit in or draw from them, tomorrow and in the days to come.
For if his work is punctuated by apparent breaks in coherence, it is because it remains, at all times, open to the unexpected and all its potential bifurcations. Villani does not hesitate to take them – all –, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes years apart. The result is a fragmental content born from an alternation of perspectives, from a disruption of itineraries without apparent reason that Barthes — whose long discourse was composed of short stories — compared to the flightpath of a butterfly.
Following the artist over the years renders visible these wingbeats — the interstices between the fractional trajectories through which his work moves forward.
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"Drawers" can be opened through the menu Anarchives on top of the page