SEPTEMBER – NOVEMBER 2024

El borde en donde estar

Curated by Daniel Montero Fayad 

Since its beginnings, Allan Villavicencio’s painting has sought to answer a question—“What is the space of painting in contemporaneity?”—in the double sense to which this question refers. First, that of the space of painting itself, that is, as the product of an accumulation and a subtraction of colored matter on a surface that produces forms. But also the problem of the place of painting in the now of images as the product of a history, of a theoretical reflection, and of a sensibility. For the exhibition El borde en donde estar, nevertheless, this reflection has been approached in a singular and unprecedented way, in which pictorial space is the result of a tension between the inside and the outside of the painting, and at the same time as a meditation on how the act of painting is constituted in relation to spatial interstices. Those interstices between the paintings, but also the distance between the person who paints (physically, sensitively, and intellectually) and the act of painting itself (the action of painting, painting as action). 

The result is not a kind of painting that expands outwards or becomes a volume as in previous works, but rather one that is contained in different formats and in each of the color structures composing them, all in an attempt to animate it. An animist painting, we might say. Or rather, a body-painting that gives space to itself. The color, which tends to be pastel, with a palette of cold and cream tones, applied in contracting layers, generates a sort of visual harmony that makes the gaze be suspended by the effects they produce. These are sensual paintings. 

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that all the paintings have their own identity, they are related because what animates them is the aim and the motive. Thus, each becomes a fragment of a totality that requires viewing the exhibition as a whole that unfolds in the gallery space. In this way, the inquiry into the space that has historically motivated Villavicencio’s painting has become an investigation of the format. As a result of a relaxed activity in time, and as they are painted, the paintings begin to function as a refuge, as a space where the artist is located. In this sense, the painting is not, under any circumstances, the result of an autobiographical experience but rather something different: it is the place in which painting has opened itself up to be.

Daniel Montero Fayad