pieles ciegas

Galeria Karen Huber 2021, Mexico City

(April 27th- June 26th)

Pieles ciegas consists of a series of paintings and sculptures arranged around a large-dimension landscape, El cortejo [Courtship]*. Painted as a triptych, this work is wagered on the contradiction between visual illusions on the canvas and how one of its panels plays out in tension with the physical space of the gallery.

This new body of work continues Villavicencio’s exploration of perception in painting. With a visual language that connects tangible and virtual realities, he animates diverse visions in which the materiality of color acts both as visual interruption and bodily activity.

The works that make up Pieles ciegas generate an oscillation between surfaces and volumes, described in the artist’s own words as an “invitation to explore a ‘residual landscape’ (landscape-fragment) created out of reminiscences of my everyday surroundings.” Here, both shapes and motifs appear and disappear in successive mutations and gradations over the course of a process of pictorial composition that has extended its residues into the gallery.

In this sense, Allan Villavicencio’s spatial imaginary refers to the changing state of material during an image’s construction, both visually and physically. By juxtaposing accumulation and excavation – and making use of multiple layers of paint and textiles – his works reveal the hidden, the impalpable, and the phantasmagoric side of things.

For all their formal quality, Allan Villavicencio’s works are sensitive pieces that heighten the imagination through their interaction with sensory reality. Pieles ciegas thus plays with a material eroticism that reveals metaphors for the formed and the formless; of the inanimate and the living.