PRESENCES / ABSENCES | Michael Asbury

Going through Villani’s prolix production,  we understand the meaning of certain references and how the artist weaves them into the materialization of his work. One realizes that it is not so much a question of the reiteration of these sources as of a distinction between their articulation.

An important clue in understanding this complexity arises in the series of white bed sheets, Varal de Emoções (Emotions clothesline), that the artist produced over a period of six years beginning around 1998-99. Bringing together a series of individual works (around sixty) within a single installation, Villani’s Varal is an array that threads the singular with the general, art historical instances with personal life, and is then left to dry, not quite ironed out yet, still wet, fluid enough for diverse interpretations and speculations to be extrapolated from. 

Having lived in France for almost two decades, Villani had been interested for some time in engaging craft men and women working within what could loosely be described as parallel economies: workers, usually in developing countries, who complement their income through their creative skills. Probing different channels, sheer chance led him into contact with a group of women working in embroidery workshops at a Psychiatric Hospital in Marilia, his own home town. 

Villani then acquired vintage linen and hemp bed sheets – the type usually associated with the late 19^th century French peasantry, two narrow stripes of fabric made on scanty looms and sewn together – in second-hand markets in Paris. He would then send them to be embroidered by the women in the workshop in Marilia.

His raw material is the fabric with which we envelop our most intimate moments, our dreams and nightmares, where we discharge our fears and traumas, where we experience the extremes of pain and pleasure, life and death. The association with these women – who suffered diverse forms of trauma, such as the loss of their children or partners.

The work thus directly incorporates an anonymous process of mourning – wether by accident or intention, the embroidered sheets often refer to themes related to presence and absence [1] – while evoking in passing the specific processes that characterize the embroideries of Bispo do Rosário and José Leonilson.

Dual, Varal de Emoções quite literally sews together affective territories two by two: the ‘crafts’ and the ‘fine arts’, the historical and the contemporary, but also the artist’s original and adopted homes. In a process of coming and going that replicates the movement of the stitching needle, the sheets describe the artist’s journey, from Brazil to France, while their physical displacement, being bought in Paris and sent to Marilia, closes the full circle.

The trajectory undertaken by Villani’s sheets also replicates the bygone European bourgeoisie habit of sending fine linen to be washed and dried under the tropical sun. If this extravagant transnational process is preserved, the difference in Villani’s case, not even the blistering tropical sun can do away  with the specter of those who have slept in them, and that these white bedsheets come back men more charged with color and dreams.

[1] The embroidery process itself, marking both the front and the back of the cloth, bestows a double character – positive/negative – to the work. This doubling of the self appears in some of the sheets, but in none so clear as in Lea e Maura (theTwins), overt reference to a celebrated work by the Brazilian painter Guignard, in which two young girls are depicted wearing identical dresses. Yet in Villani’s depiction the twins are absent, only their empty dresses being depicted. They are therefore more than the self-divided, they are division and loss.

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