The dream places

If Pérez Villalta reads that what he has planned in Alcalá 31 is a

he will have a stroke.

But the artist has turned that always complex Madrid room into an installation, a labyrinth of asymmetric symmetry.

By means of a network of walls, he has remodeled a large room with columns in a zigzagging circuit that leads to a central space, presided over by a classic pavilion -which hides a secret-, generating rooms within the room.

Architectures arranged to accommodate painted architectures.

Curator and artist have thus created various formats that play with the dialogue between conceptually or aesthetically related works.

The sensation of the visitor is to invade a dream of the creator, one that, like all dreams, does not establish a linear narrative, but a whimsical one.

A tour surrounded by paintings (from early works from the seventies to others from this same year), but also furniture, jewelry and models.

An angular space that is a basilica, museum and cistern, the latter only visible from the second floor.

At that height, the viewer will be a parishioner facing the gaze of the pantocrator, the divine representation of geometry flanked by two corridors of golden light, the Byzantine afterlife.

Make no mistake, that severe face, called

(1995), is not that of a saint.

It is not the result of sentences, but of equations.

It has been drawn from regular polytopes, each nuance comes from a matrix: eyes, ears, mouth, nose, wrinkles.

Everything calculated in perfect harmony.

A delusion similar to that of the scientist obsessed with quasicrystals from the recent Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer documentary

2020), not far removed from the patterns in Islamic mosaics.

Something of all this, of the hallucination of the irrefutable, of the science of meditation, is in this exhibition.

From that top, we will watch the viewer as a confidant of the intimacy of the characters in

(1993-1994) and a lost sailor in front of a miniature lighthouse.

Witness of the artist's exercises of representation, of his mannerist stubbornness, of the spatial conception based on light and the classical vanishing point.

And in the motifs: the liquid, the vegetal, the siesta, the eyes.

Ideal cities in paintings that look like frescoes.

Reflexes.

References to Dalí's bland nonsense, De Chirico's nostalgic metaphysics, chivalric perspective, Marcello Piacentini's architecture, medieval schematics.

Scenarios, constructions that seem to fall, sucked up by an invisible vortex, as well as the worlds represented by an artist who attends his fictions in the first person, such as the Bret Easton Ellis from

(2005).

The contemplative creator, in a waking state, in intentional insomnia, who never looks out of frame.

He remains absorbed in the landscape of his ramblings, as if he had not been the author, but were acheropite images.

Art as a labyrinth

or the exhibition as a work, curated by Óscar Alonso Molina, infects that serene pleasure that Guillermo Pérez Villalta embraces, who speaks Cadiz but believes in Italian.

His determination to make the imagined real, to materialize his fantasies with a square and bevel, finds its place in this retrospective in a corner;

the visitor will be able, if he proposes to do so, to conclude whether Daedalus' career has always been straight.

The catalog, an exercise in hybridity between the artist's book and the bible, will give us clues.

They have done something dangerous: include texts written by the artist 40, 30, 25 years ago.

Fire test passing the printing test.

Thanks to them we see that, indeed, his speech is chiseled in marble, from his essay

(1983).

There is a commitment to the dismantling of the evolution in progress of the history of art, in favor of a concept "more similar to an arboreal issue, like branches".

His disappointment with the art of the present is reinforced by its permanence in the classical canon.

This explains the greater prominence that his latest works have in this retrospective, not the first, which, let's not forget, were composed in tune with a group, Los Esquizos, who proclaimed the advent of something “new”: the New Figuration.

Pérez Villalta has remained faithful to the founding rules, impervious to the acid rain of trends in a hectic half century.

They are your guiding beacon in the midst of the storm.

Let's take refuge.

We are in front of an “interior” designer: his artistic practice is introverted, of freehand imagination.

Hence a spiritual, superhuman longing sprouts, even if it is based on grids.

Its labyrinth - an artifact of pagan origin - has been designed under the concept of sacred geometry.

It follows that creed, that of faith, in a divine presence in natural forms, and moves away from that dogma, that of modernity.

Labyrinth which in English is translated by

but also by

which comes from

amaze.

The astonishment of one who, absorbed in beauty, knows that the goal is not to reach any end, but to get lost along the way.

Art as a labyrinth.

Guillermo Pérez Villalta.

Sala Alcalá 31. Madrid.

Until April 25.