TALES OF GULLIVER | Philippe Piguet  

One must have seen his studio to capture the almost unlikely world of Julio Villani. Long established in Paris, the artist is the very image of his production: truly puzzling. At least he is never where you expect him to be, or where you thought you would find him. That is because Villani is an inventor who loves to take in a situation, an image or materials and immediately invest them, making them tumble into the order of a new language, of a distorted vision, never lacking humor, nor criticism, nor poetry. On the contrary: he likes to mix it all, in his own way, off the beaten paths of what’s considered “fashionable”.

The playfulness of his work proceeds neither from a foolhardy rush that would ignore reality, nor from a posture intended to hide it, in the name of some unknown concern. It is rather a way of highlighting this “little reality” to which André Breton dedicated a major text in 1927 – Introduction to the Discourse on the Paucity of Reality – and which Jorge Luis Borges further elaborated in 1941 in an opus entitled Fictions. The reasoning developed here, establishing a consubstantial relationship between fantasticality and the notion of literature – envisaged primarily as a fable and projecting us towards the outer borders of experience – finds in Julio Villani’s plastic approach a particularly clear echo. Like the writer, he quests after a form of anti-naturalism that guards against any narrative intention. His work refers rather to the invalidation of all cognitive referents, strives to bring discomfiture to the conventions expected from reality and to shake the foundations of intellectual rationality. In short, the art of Julio Villani is seized by a subversive thought that allows him to doubt reality. Therefore, his notion of representation does not escape metaphor because the reality to which it refers cannot be understood except  through a metaphorical discourse.

The inventory of his work includes a sculpture made ​​of three huge wooden cup-and-ball games, which the artist presents like toys abandoned on the ground by some passing giant. The game consists in throwing the ball in the air so that it fits onto the stem when falling down. Symbolic of a perfect wholeness between entities intended to join, the cup and ball is an object charged with meaning: it is at once the emblem of the relationship between life and death, man and woman, one and all, yin and yang, etc; the ensemble ball, stem and cord forming a singular trinity. These are no longer mere toys but the elements of a theater the monumentality of which invokes the tales in which stroll the heroes Pantagruel, Gulliver or Micromégas.

It did not take the artist long to react and retort to the site of the Abbey of Saint-Jean d’Orbestier. Seized by the powerful architecture, especially its clear stone arches which highlight the entire nave, Villani saw in them the shape of the fragile metal hoops through which one must drive wooden balls in the right sequence, using a mallet, during a croquet game. Julio Villani thus loves to subvert the facts with which he is obliged to compose; to divert them from their function, or to reset them to respond to another register or again to transform their nature, so as to make them assume a new identity. Here, he has chosen to replace the sacred precinct by a playground, but one intended for a game of yore, its monumentalisation catapulting it to the level of a fantasy – or a fable, to use two Borges’ terms. 

By putting heritage, religion, leisure and dreamlike vision back-to-back, Julio Villani inscribes his proposal right in the heart of post modernity. Something surrealistic, if not surreal is at work in his approach, which recalls the recommendation made by André Breton to his troops when he encouraged them to give body to what they saw in dreams. With one crucial difference, though: Julio Villani is a daydreamer. Mind and eyes always on the look-out for the world around him, he quickly sees “the little reality” it bears, and transforms it by a simple thought into something entirely new. This is magic, for – to use a consecrated expression used to define what artists are – he is among the “Magicians of the world” and invites us to imagine reality on the margins of canons and conventions. Of one thing Julio Villani can be sure: we do not come out unscathed from the experience he offers us.