LINES AND FLAT TINTS (Architectures) | Michael Asbury

The generic title of this series of paintings is Collapsible architectures. They are quick drawings, almost doodles, in charcoal over acrylic, gesso or other opaque primers. They are produced by drawing over a still wet coat, and as such are not quite paintings nor drawings but something in between: the drawn trace becomes absorbed by the paint, it gains a painterly quality, while the paint is penetrated, tainted by the charcoal mark.

For Villani, the main point seems to be the spontaneity of these structural formations. As such they are demonstrative of the artist’s attitude vis-a-vis the act of drawing, in short, the quest of the sheer pleasure of tracing a line. This freedom of the line gives these works an intrinsic serial quality. The drawings are composed of what might be called concrete forms, geometric figures that seem to be free of any figurative connotation, neither representative nor derived from reality. These same concrete forms appear in a series of ethereal monochromatic collages.

Here, however, anchored by charcoal lines, sometimes materialized by color, they become quasi-representations of architectural spaces. In other words, our gaze imposes a spatial quality on these quick charcoal lines on fresh paint that is not present, or less obvious, in the collages.

Elaborating on this series, Villani recalls Lygia Clark, referring to her notion of an organic line formed by the junction of two planes. The lines in the Architectures series stem from the juxtaposition of planes, then merge with them – as if Villani were rewinding the Constructivist legacy back to his original gesture, to Joaquín Torres-García perhaps, and the confrontation leading to the creation of the term “concrete art” by Theo van Doesburg. “Nothing is more concrete than a line, a color, a surface,” he said, thus advocating a “non-abstract” painting of reality, in which the pictorial elements have no other meaning than their own reality.

Yet it is not the origin that matters to Villani here, but the unfolding of historical references in his work, and a strange process of inversion appears in his Architectures: sending concrete and abstraction back to back, he presents us with an “almost-figuration”, in which the line, color and surface of van Doesburg intertwine with the emotional reality of a Torres-García.

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