Fernando Villena
April 8 - May 6, 2011
Fernando Villena If the Western landscape creates one thing within a viewer, it is an existential, personal experience. It invites one to partake in the tangible beauty at hand, while, simultaneously, it illuminates the personal insignificance within vastness. It is quizzical and comprehending the organic spatial planes of the West involves addressing a dichotomy of scale. Through the relationship he creates between modernist painting and photography, Central Utah Art Center artist Fernando Villena examines spacial perception within his Utah landscape abstractions in this untitled exhibition. While Villena, a native of Spain, isn’t of the lineage of Western landscape painters, it’s obvious the desert has given him the same gift: a sense of place and space. He works in the peripheral perception of the subconscious and collects, conglomerates, abstracts and exploits the slight impressions of a vista or the dancing of light on leaves that easily becomes forgotten in everyday realities. The outcome is representational, inversed and decontextualized. A scene under Villena’s brush could, at once, be a several-mile-long stretch of canyon or the up-close view through a small arch of red rock. And by creating contrarian, inversed planes of space and matter, he situates the viewer in the middle of a study to ponder the meaning of perceived space. And as an exhibition within the art center, each piece works off the next like a series of panoramic snapshots —similar to how each turn through the Utah landscape persuades us to look at what’s directly before us, while not forgetting the greater context that is all around. The squareness of Villena’s pieces, added by the framing of bold mono colors on, generally, at least, three sides, creates a window frame effect, or, more pertinently, a photographic effect. Using photography as his stock material, he captures images of the desert and manipulates them with computer software to derive a muse, which manifests in his paintings as, at least, enigmatic colors and intuitive layering. This synthesis largely revolves around Villena’s en plein air approach to landscape painting and photography combined with a modernist aesthetic. In one abstraction—specific references are impossible because Villena refuses to name or label his works so it may be seen in and of itself—a cross-section of nonfigurative juniper branches lies at the forefront of more layered branches, as if one was peering through a desert forest. Yet Villena creates a stark contrast in spacial alignment by juxtaposing this with an arching bravado-red section, accented with black and beige, to
the left. Battling for the attention of the foreground, each section simultaneously usurps the spacial significance of the other. His work seems experimental and intuitive, although he is meticulous in his process. In another painting Villena’s use of chiaroscuro evocatively demonstrates the variety of light he spotted on walks outside his studio. Rather than capture the desert’s brilliant color wheel as realism, he unfolds the palette as he saw the colors evolve over the seasons—done so strictly by mixing primary colors. Framed by a thick chocolate and carnelian lines in the foreground, the colors —bottom to the top—develop from winter’s snowy white to the glaucous green of juniper leaves in the spring. Villena’s brushwork testifies to his actions—near-
Digital Print 19 3/4”x15”
transparent layers of razor blade paint lines are full of tension. Yet the top layers reveal a multitude of tawnies and umbers underneath, representation of rock and soil. His painterly method flips the notion of acrylic paint as synthetic and creates the ocular illusion that it is organic. Through this, he evokes the essence of organic shapes, a counterbalance to the lack of such forms in modern architectural design. Austen Diamond
Painting on Canvas 16”x16”
Painting on Paper 24”x19”
Installation View
Painting on Canvas 21”x16”
Painting on Canvas 20”x16”
The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts
Central Utah Art Center - 86 N. Main - Ephraim, Ut. 84627 - 435.283.5110 - www.cuartcenter.org