Jeronimo Villa Colombia, b. 1990

In Jeronimo Villa's work, three major subjects emerge: impossibility, time and death. Impossibility is depicted by means of denying function and highlighting that which is impossible, chronicling tensions and glorifying contrasts. Time and death are expressed by rescuing found objects from neglect and oblivion. This results in volumetric pieces composed of materials and stories, that tend to convey a certain nostalgia for their former self. Jeronimo Villa adopts derelict objects, intervenes their shape and their forgotten function, and puts together structures where geometry is clearly expressed. He often finds his raw materials in the street. More than being just abandoned, these objects bear scars of human violence, of the elements’ impact, and of the nature of the material. They seem resolved to cease being themselves and become the friction between time and oblivion. Next to a sewer, lying against a lamp pole or sharing the space with the stench of urine, the collection of these nameless objects is curated mostly by passion. They are gradually included in an inventory that is free from disdain and which negates desolation.

The liaison between life and death is the conceptual backbone of the work. It is the source from where it evolves. Found objects were dead in life and now are celebrated and implemented within a sculptural and conceptual process.

Chairs, furniture, blinds, tree-trunks, windows and an assortment of intervened objects are frozen in time. Some others are embedded or have had things embedded in them, like a memory that is lodged in time. Books, strings, wood, paint and fire, a full dialogue between materials and objects. The work embraces the nameless objects and baptizes them with a new order that converses with space and offers mature narratives; an order that is consolidated in sculpture, in painting, and mostly, in poetry. The object is now a memory, a past that is engraved in the work. Time has stopped and left behind still scenes that elude death and recount just a tiny fraction of what they have ceased to be. 

In different ways, and through different means, the work expresses a longing for a time gone by, like the function that is no more, or the scar that the past left on the material.