GUILLERMO PÉREZ VILLALTA

Tarifa 1948

Lives and works in Tarifa

He was part of the core of the New Madrileña Figuration. Linked to the gallerys Buades, Soledad Lorenzo, Siboney or Rafael Ortiz.

Guillermo Pérez Villalta is defined as an architect and has developed an extensive multidisciplinary production in the fields of architecture, sculpture, writing, design and applied arts. Highlighted for his relevance is the pictorial work where he recovers the formal and conceptual complexity of the painting through the parity between image and idea from an intellectual, philosophical and methodological perspective. His paintings are testimony to studies and the result of findings and key reflections on shapes and concepts.

Pérez Villalta understands painting as a space of freedom where he exercises his sovereignty from a paradoxical and heterogeneous skepticism. He searches for beauty and pleasure through art from personal points of view as a defense for imagination and fantasy as reference, a look at the history of art without regard to time periods, the search for novelty in the tradition or the formulation of a representation without boundaries between realism and pure abstraction.

Pérez Villalta has developed throughout his trajectory, his own iconography from the analysis of the codes of classical and Christian mythology as a way to express his thoughts. Through the creation of allegorical instruments, he builds a discourse that transcends the autobiographical motivation part his painting, as in the dialogue established between the homoerotic symbolism of Christ and Dionysus.

The geometric design of his paintings is based on complex plots that encourage interaction between the volumetric perspective and flatness of the ornament. The architectural study of classical and avant-garde languages, coupled with his ability to develop spaces and volumes, have enabled him to formulate new and surprising conceptions of pictorial space where perspective systems coexist, East to the Renaissance with plastic conceptions of the historical avant-garde.

His areas of research include studies around the ornamental modulation- rococo to the east -the invention of architectural styles associated with key conceptual or formal variations in the representation of the human figure ranging from naturalism to metamorphosis. His themes are developed in series which he works on throughout his career. The most representative are those dedicated to cycles or opinions that focus on the relationship between art and artist.

Among the pictorial references the following painters are highlighted: Giotto, Piero de la Francesca, Canaleto, Katsushika Hokusai, Nicolas Poussin, Giorgio De Chirico, Marcel Duchamp, Kasimir Malevich or Frank Stella.

Consulted bibliography: Alonso Molina, Óscar, “Souvenir de la vida. El legado de Guillermo Pérez Villalta”, in the exhibition catalogue Guillermo Pérez Villalta. Souvenir de la vida. El legado de Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Sevilla, CAAC, 2013. B. Olmos, Santiago, “Interiores”; Huici, Fernando “De una memoria laberíntica”, in the exhibition catalogue Guillermo Pérez Villalta, Sevilla, Junta de Andalucía, 1995.