Jerónimo Villa
Bio
Jerónimo Villa has developed a conceptually rooted practice to create work that highlights the frivolity of function by repurposing items to challenge inherent purpose. Refuting the status of obsolete, Villa collects specific, utilitarian materials that juxtapose each other in nature to construct refined geometric artworks transforming their original form entirely.
Born with a sculptor as a father and a fashion designer as a mother, his fascination with the materiality of objects sprouted early in life by witnessing the transformation of materials firsthand from raw to refined. This translates in the aesthetic of his work, as he holds a key understanding of how treatment of materials can change how they will exist, or cease to do so, in perpetuity.
Villa trained as a musician at the University of Los Andes (2008), later translating his knack for rhythm and composition to the visual arts and began using experimental materials to collapse a variety of art historical styles and forms.
Statement
Among what the work exposes, there are three important points that have been developed in the process: impossibility, time and death. The first is embodied in the constant denial of function and the highlighting of the impossible, narrating tensions and exalting oppositions. The other two, in the use of the object found in disuse or oblivion. The found object was dead in life and is now highlighted and implemented in a sculptural and conceptual process. The work expresses in various ways and by different means a longing for the time that has already passed, such as the function that no longer exists or the scar that the past has left on the material.
More than abandoned, the objects bear the scars of human violence, the blows of the weather and the nature of the material. They seem determined to stop being themselves with a certain function, and become the friction of time and oblivion.
