Iron, industrial lacquer
130 x 141 x 88 cm; 93 x 115 x 115 cm; 144 x 133 x 118 cm
Contrary to the self-portrait procedure, which consists in questioning who one is at an exact moment, the exercise to which Julio Villani avails himself in his Scaffolding for a Portrait - his own - consists in trying to understand how the subject became what he became: it is a man in becoming that he portrays. The self-referential piece, the foundation of the project - the conical shape, the two circles of different diameters connected by three rods - resembles a popular coffee strainer support, on which the artist has coupled various elements. The first construction was quickly followed by a second, to finally become a trilogy. Nothing prevents him from adding a fourth, a fifth, an umpteenth scaffold to the set in the future. After all, the self-portraitist’s endeavor has no end; there is no definitive answer to the question “Who am I?” and the search for the self is by definition liable to be always prolonged.
Julio Villani
Marilia, São Paulo, 1956
He currently lives and works in São Paulo and Paris
www.julio-villani.com
Julio Villani was educated between São Paulo, where he grew up, and Paris, where he forged his identity as an artist. His deliberate choice for this unfolding and the constructive form that he imprinted on it give his work a dynamic dimension, which is determined, paradoxically, by unity. Where others would be struck by division and dispersion, Villani finds matter and motive for concentration and reunion, opening a path that follows strictly the obsession of a gaze that seeks to reveal the secret side of things.
Thread, line, net, knot... Julio Villani’s art is inhabited by the idea of link, of counterpoint, sometimes of opposition; it is built from the organization of a to-and-fro, of an exchange and it is in the core of this, in this “in-between”, that everything happens.
The problem of identity, which underlies his procedure, is apprehended by a whole work around memory. The process of recovery adopted by the artist and the type of recycling to which she submits the objects he integrates is the artist’s way of conjugating two temporalities in order to constitute a new one.
Between geology and genealogy, the distance is minimal: a same palimpsest dimension characterizes the idea of the sedimentation of space and time. It is by an analogous process that Julio Villani’s art is constituted and acquires body and root, regardless of all consideration of borders, aiming at the emergence of a universal language.
[P. Piguet, excerpts from “Julio Villani : connecting the world”, IN “Julio Villani: It’s [a ga]me”, Ed. Bookstorming, Paris, 2010]
