Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Blanco I [White I]

Image caption
DARÍO VILLALBA

Blanco I [White I]

  • 1982
  • Collage (silkscreen printed fabrics), oil, charcoal and inks on canvas
  • 199,5 x 159,5 cm
  • Cat. P_301
  • Acquired in 1983
By:
Isabel Tejeda

The two works by Darío Villalba in the Banco de España Collection are of interest in understanding the development of Spanish painting beyond informalism from the mid-1960s onwards. It seems paradoxical to cite a work such as Snow Fall to understand the directions of painting. The painting is from 1965, and its radical nature connects with discourses of the international avant-garde that reached Spain, albeit barely, and of which Villalba was well aware as he lived in the United States at that time.  In that vein, his ground-breaking pairing of painting and photography, or painting as photography and vice versa, opened up new paths out of the stagnation in which were both immersed. He opted for an anti-modernist discourse in the defence of the shattering of closed and ‘pure’ disciplines: ‘My creative journey is a constant sabotaging of languages’. Linguistic research and the prominence of human beings, of suffering and of pain place Darío Villalba close to authors such as Boltanski. Villalba considered painting and photography to be equivalent media that capture a fleeting instant, enabling him to stress the pathos that is a permanent feature of his work: in Snow Fall, the snow-white paint occludes the poetic image and provides a bare glimpse, creating greater tension in the dichotomy between the abstract and the concrete. 

In the 1970s he returned to painting, taking a further step in the integration of languages and of discourse, for which he used collage on many occasions, as in White I (1982): ‘I used collage to begin to destroy my usual images and recompose them in new works. The idea of the phoenix, being reborn from the ashes, is characteristic of my work’.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Roberto Díaz
Darío Villalba
Donostia / San Sebastián 1939 - Madrid 2018

Darío Villalba started at the San Fernando Fine Arts Academy in 1957 and at the same time studied Law and Philosophy & Literature as an external student. In 1962, he was awarded a grant by the Rodríguez Acosta Foundation of Granada to study at Harvard University, where he came into contact with North-American pop art. His work, which started from the pictorial, then shifted with the creation of a radical innovation in the use of photography emulsified on canvas as a medium, moving away from conceptual and pop art techniques towards a more metaphysical, transcendental use of the image, by means of which he depicted essential aspects of the individual in a dehumanised society. He worked on referential photographs – taken by himself or from the media – expanding or fragmenting them or altering them with lines, brushstrokes and varnishes, in a process of concealment and deconstruction that constantly sabotages their visual language. The Encapsulated Roses series (1964), which comprises hanging sculptures made of methacrylate, was unveiled at the Spanish Pavilion at the 1970 Venice Biennale. The series was met with great international acclaim, which was confirmed with his second generation of ‘encapsulates’, which won him the International Painting Award at the 1973 São Paulo Biennial.

He has since staged solo shows at leading international venues including the Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany, 1974); the Stadt Museum (Bochum, Germany, 1975); the Heidelberg Kunstverein (Germany, 1976); the Valencia Institute of Modern Art (Valencia, 1994); the Kursaal Donostia (San Sebastián, 2001); the Centre for Contemporary Art of Galicia (Santiago de Compostela, 2001); and a major anthology of his work at the Reina Sofía (Madrid, 2007). The Luis González Robles Museum at the University of Alcalá de Henares organised an exhibition of his work in 2016. In 1983, he received the Spanish National Award for Plastic Arts; in 2002 he entered the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando as a full member, and in 2003 he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.

Roberto Díaz

 
«Darío Villalba. Recent Work 1980-1983» (Madrid, 1983). «Darío Villalba: 1964-1994» (Valencia, 1994).
Vv.Aa. Darío Villalba, Madrid, Dirección General de Bellas Artes, Ministerio de Cultura, 1983. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez & Julián Gállego Banco de España. Colección de pintura, Madrid, Banco de España, 1985. Alfonso E. Pérez Sánchez, Julián Gállego & María José Alonso Colección de pintura del Banco de España, Madrid, Banco de España, 1988. Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.