Here we come to meet an artist who is getting to know herself.
More than a play on words or a reflexivity exercise, the statement points to a central aspect of Andy Villela’s work.
As Vilém Flusser elucidated when stating that “a shoemaker does not just make shoes but also, through his activity, makes himself a shoemaker,” for Andy, painting is not the result of her activity as a painter, but her way of becoming an artist.
Deviating from professional expectations arising from an education in advertising and in various ways reversing the logic of advertising production, Andy Villela is the result of the paintings that, being made by her, above all, have fabricated her as an artist over the past few years.
Thus, as the space-time of her autopoiesis, Andy’s work has been a practice of investigating creation processes. Each of her recent works is a laboratory of technical, material, formal, and semantic strategies that serve not only her self-production as artworks but, above all, the creation of a poetics that has taken creation itself as a question, as matter.
Although the theological, metaphysical, or mythical approaches to creation have been a central theme in Western art history due to its implication with the Church and monarchies—whose powers were imagined as originating from God as Pantocrator, the Great Creator—Andy is little concerned with such theological or metaphysical approaches. In another direction, morphogenesis has intrigued her greatly, causing a thematic and aesthetic convergence between the development processes of forms occurring in biology, cosmology, and the fictionalization of bodies equally constituted by cells, cosmic dust, and paint.
The technical profusion of her recent paintings – combining acrylic, stencils, oil pastels, spray, and fire, among other materials – is just one layer of this research that, in pursuit of the processes of formation and transmutation of things and bodies, takes chemistry and time as territories of experimentation. Not surprisingly, this exhibition brings together works whose titles—such as “Craters, Holes, and Spaces,” “Sputnik I,” or “Nebula”—point to the vastness of this research.
While the artist has transitioned through processes of hormone treatments and gender performativities, it is not the private dimension of her body but the public discursiveness of her work that Andy Villela has reserved the responsibility to socially address the right to the continuous recreation of forms, i.e., the expansion of morphogenesis beyond the embryonic period of life, extending it to infinity.
This is how, as experienced in the creation process and alluded to by the title of the largest work in the exhibition, “Embryo,” in the space-time of each painting, Andy joins the morphogenesis of bodies. She knows how to perform, in the reduction of the pictorial plane, the expansion of the universe itself. Hence her commitment is not primarily to “paint images” but mainly to engage in creation processes whose agencies want to be distributed among the materialities and accidents of a making that cannot be planned, that challenges anticipations, and intends to sabotage its desires for control. Paintings that are not thought of as products of the artist’s doing but are capable, on the contrary, of continuously forming and giving birth to their own author in their morphogenesis.
As a witness to this process, I saw most of the works now gathered in Nebula transform in such a way that I could say some of them were reborn several times in Andy’s studio, taking on new designs, inaugurating other pictorial fields, acquiring alternative palettes, among other transmutations.
In response to the transformative limitations of acrylic paint, Villela summoned other techniques, boldly facing the difficult coexistence of different materialities on the same plane, as seen in “The Fall.” Faced with the risk of the hegemony of a theme or image, the artist reacted with a policy of accumulation, overlap, and deformation of signs, as performed by the work that titles the show. To the repetition of some gestures, she responded with the variation of scales and their inevitable demand for other movements of the body and, with them, alternative gestures – as shown in the contrast between “Consideration” and “Évanoussaint.”
As indicated by “Opium” or “Embryo,” paintings that refer to poppies and ketamine, this creative process can be dysphoric for subjectivities that, like those of this time, have been forged in the immediacy of neoliberalism in its attempt to commodify life completely.
Portraying allusions to substances that temporarily numb our anxieties or sensibilities is, therefore, a small clue to how distressing the bet on morphogenesis can be: trust in transformation as a practice immanent to life, accepting, as Andy notes in a notebook, “the radicality of what makes no sense”—even if only for a moment; even if for a long time.
Let us embrace the haziness of our continuous recreations, which is what Andy Villela’s first solo exhibition at Nonada invites us to do, whose works have been formed through morphogenic adventures and, as such, can mobilize perceptions, reactions, or interpretations that are also unstable and mutable; perhaps distressing.
Anguish deeply interests Andy Villela as a space-time for doubt and restlessness, engines of movement and transformations. After all, as Lacan taught in his seminar on anxiety, “nothing is more unstable than the concept of cure. (…) All deviations are possible from anxiety. (…) What is avoided is what, in anxiety, resembles frightening certainty. (…) Anxiety, of all signs, is the one that does not deceive.”
Clarissa Diniz