Nonabrasive Times

Works by Jeronimo Villa

The landscape is constantly changing. It is neither static nor perishable; it is mutant, fluctuating, fluid. In the distance, mountains resemble still paintings, marble sculptures. We live divergent times: we have aged, and the landscape is barely waking up. Under our footsteps, everything moves at constant, almost imperceptible rhythms. The territory breathes and moves, shaped by winds, gases, liquids, thunder, earthquakes. Springs and riverbeds emerge, victims and executioners, streams and deserts. A jumble of scraps, a myriad of lives and deaths, a fabric without resolution enter through the gates of our eyes. We are spectators, actors and witnesses of the figure changing under and over our bodies. This world is covered with abrasive blankets that do not stop rubbing. Impermanence rules times without roughness, times sanded repeatedly, times of unstable forms, normal times.

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.