Point à la ligne
Julio Villani solo show.
« Nothing can be repaired except death ».
Paul Valéry, Cahiers
« Not a day without a line » .
Paul Klee, Credo du créateur
The series of paintings presented by Julio Villani in his second exhibition at the RX gallery brings a generic title: collapsible architectures. Anglicism is orderly, because the French words « pliable » and « démontable » does not include the unpredictable dimension of the adjective English: A thing that involves a collapse will collapse at any time.
His pictorial production responds to his Instabilities, assemblages supported by the tension of a wire, with shaky forms by which Villani seeks the continual interruption of the movement: the obtaining of a state oscillating eternally between the mobile and the stable (as the arrow of Zenon, » who fly and who does not fly » or an Achilles » still striding » (1)).
After all, there has never been a real immobility. « Nothing exists in a permanent state », suggests Roland Barthes; « The tree is new in any moments », we focus on its form only because we don’t grasp the subtleties of its movement.
The work of Villani as a whole seems to be constructed according to a system of (mental) construction relating to the relativity of fixity, consisting in keeping in suspense, as long as possible, these silent transformations, these imperceptible movements which separate being from his becoming. The line is not here the shortest distance that connects two points but what results when a point falls on the mop. Unable to predict how far he will go. Sometimes, jumping from the frame, he will enter the space; then lines and ropes, ropes and ropes, and draw in the air.
The lineaments of Villani’s work are as much a means of setting creation in motion and making borders unstable. In its architectures, they extend well beyond the canvas: the frame is the only portion of whole that it gives us to see, located between an invisible beginning and an imaginary end, with bifurcations potential. The artist does not hesitate to borrow them all, one after the other, the ones simultaneously to others.
The result is multiple art, composed of poetic overlaps, in which lines depict its path – from painting to embroidery, from collage to sculpture – completely free.
(1.)Paradoxes of Zeno of Elea evoked by Paul Valery in the poem The Marine Cemetery.
(2.)Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, in Complete Works.