BLACKBOARD | Guilherme Wisnik
Sketches of colorful tree trunks and branches, or pure geometric figures arranged in unstable balance? There is a clear breath of dubiousness in the works presented here by Julio Villani. Something that oscillates not only between abstraction and naturalism, but also, for instance, between the visual and the verbal – as the artist assigns great importance to the titles of his works, and invites friends to enhance these semantic meanings, asking them to write sentences based on the association of words, blindly, in the absence of images, and incorporates these texts to the exhibition. The surrealist principle of the game, of the cadavre exquis, prevails here: figures (graphic or textual) are assembled collectively, and somewhat at random, because there is order to be found in chance encounter – objective or subjective. Albeit a reverse order.
Born in the inlands of São Paulo, Julio has been living for most part of the year in France for more than four decades now. As a tinker, he assembles sculptures from found objects. Strange and familiar contraptions, which he calls, with affectionate irony, Almost readymade. This intelligent taste for appropriation appears here in the collages made on manuscripts, mostly notary documents from the 19th century. In this case, the verbal field is the background of the composition, in elaborate calligraphy and patterns that constitute a template against which the colorful figures, soaked in oil paint or acrylic, or drawn with crayon, stand in contrast. Unlike the cubist collages of Braque and Picasso, which smuggled the newspaper into the painting, here the paintings invade the graphic and textual field of the old documents, creating an overlapping order that transforms the calligraphic background into hubbub.
In the paintings, made with acrylic paint, charcoal and kaolin on canvas, in larger formats, experiments on structuring the space predominate, through hollow and transparent prisms. Generically entitled Collapsible architectures by the artist, they present spaces organized by fragile lines and color fields that make us imagine temporary, unstable, impermanent constructions. And if the clarity of the geometric planes echoes the ideality of Suprematism, their tonal colors, with brushstrokes in well-marked bands, similar to those of Volpi’s tempera, give these paintings a reflective, lean and artisanal dimension, closer to the Brazilian context.
This yearning for a wavering structure, which only organizes provisional and imprecise orders, has its most perfect translation in the Blackboard. There, in the abrupt contrast between light and dark, everything can overlap, at the same time that it tends to disappear. The accumulation, erasure, and submission of one order to another establish a permanent playing field, which feels like home to Villani.
The wildfire scenes present in his collages, accentuating the idea of “cornered nature” – one of his titles –, echo the dark and recent times of misgovernment in the country, during which these works were made. However, in the artistic context of this great Blackboard by Julio Villani, the difficulties are redeemed in the always possible idea of a fresh start. Not as a tabula rasa, from scratch, but as patient sketches of a structure that would continuously seek its best form. A structure in which nature and geometry do not oppose each other. And the constructive “will to form” operates, par hasard, through the game.