Into the Black: ”Violetta Villas“

EXHIBITIONS AND PROJECTS

2012 Face/OFF, Gallery Gebr. Lehmann, Berlin.Group show with Eberhard Havekost, Maria Brunner, Tatjana Doll, Frank Nitsche, Bjarne Melgaard and John Isaacs.Curated by Olga Hammermeister.

2011 On Time, Villa Venetian. Miami, during Art Basel Miami Beach. Curated by Joanna Parkin.

2011 Uprising, Warsaw. Video Art, collaboration for a giant screen projection for Robert Kupisz show.

2011 XY, London City Hall, London. Curated by Russell Chater and Rupert Record.

2011 Showroom, Metropolitan Works, London. Curated by Marcus Bowerman.

2011 Idea of Worship, Clifford Chance Collection, London. Curated by Michael Petry, Royal Academy and Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), London.

2011 CutOut, London. Curated by Yu’an Bu, Sothebys Institute of Art, London.

2010 Icons, London. Group show with Grayson Perry, Chris Ofili, Peter Doig, Elmgreen and Dragset. Patron - Victoria Miro, Victoria Miro Gallery. Curated by Eiko Honda and James Putnam.

2010 Safe Haven, London. Curated by Rupert Record.

2010 Wicked, Hackney Wicked Art Festival, London. Curated by Sydney Southam. My work featured in Saatchi Gallery report:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/blogon/art_news/matthew_miles_emerging_art_at_hackney_wicked_london/6511

2010 Blasphemy, Barcelona. Curated by Alix Marie, Helene Butler and Flow Valmont.

2010 Close But No Cigar, Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA), London. Curated by David Gryn.

2010 Billbored, Tate Modern, Liverpool Street station, Shoreditch, Southbank and Saint Paul's Cathedral, Pollocks, London. Curated by Josef Valentino.

2009 ANK, London. Group show with Anthony Gormley, Tracey Emin and Wolfgang Tillmans. Curated by Katy Dawe.

2009 Name Portable, Hales Gallery, London. Curated by Patrick Brill (Bob and Roberta Smith) and Ben Cain.

2009 Art Art Art Gallery, London. Commission for Matt Roberts Arts Foundation.

2008 Communication:Live, Saatchi Gallery, London. Site-specific installation.

2007 Empty, Da! Creative Space, London. Curated by Simon McAndrew and Bogna Chreptowicz.

2006 Gallery 43, London. Curated by Simon McAndrew and Bogna Chreptowicz.

2005 Co-founder of DA! Art Movement, London.

2004 PECS, International Youth Festival, Poland/Hungary.

PRIZES AND AWARDS/SCHOLARSHIPS

Sir John Cass Sculpture Prize, London. 2011
John Burn – Sponsorship Award – 3D printing. 2011
Metropolitan Works – Sponsorship Award – Rapid Prototyping. 2011

PUBLICATIONS

Saatchi Art and Music Magazine
Saatchi Gallery Online Magazine
The Guardian
Art Forum
This Is London
Dazed and Confused
Fault
Art Review
Jotta
PoP
FAD
London Insider
Open
Art Slant
Amelia Magazine
Creative Boom
AXM
GT
Agent Magazine
Glass Magazine
AN Magazine

ARTIST STATEMENT

Above all I’m interested in idealised worlds. Many of my works –
including the new circular paintings – feature hyper-bright colours
that to me represent dreams, targets and ambitions. I think that often
these aims are impossible ideals of perfection, so it’s important to
me that the zones are faded into each other; elusive. Our ambitions
are the same: what we aim for can quickly become somewhere else.
Paintings such as ‘Young Slaves’ and the sculpture ‘Three Graces’
explore the possibility that the ideals we’re aiming for can enslave
us. Our culture places high value on celebrity, fashion, youth and
beauty. Super-perfect images and messages – celebrating and
advertising these targets – are all around us, and our attempts to
attain at least some of that ‘perfection’, whether through shopping,
sex or body transformation, can trap us in work, debt and limited ways
of thinking.

It’s easy to become an accessory to a world that sells us accessories
but I’m as attracted as anyone to some of the ideals being sold to me.
So it seems natural that a lot of my works use the unreal images of
fashion editorial and advertising as a starting point. I see a kind of
dark glamour under the bright colours, and investigate that in
paintings such as the diptych ‘We are Slaves to the World that Doesn't
Exist’ and ‘Ideal Five Rings Target Circle’. In this piece a boy’s S+M
mask accessory traps him in a magazine page – or someone else’s
borrowed sex prison.

The consumerism based around celebrity fashion and sexy-cool has
become a new religion, in which the worshippers strive for the
fleeting moments in which they believe they are gods. Reality TV, and
the bursts of hype around new artists and performers in all media,
fuel this idea of quick, accessible fame. There’s a sense of the
interchangeable that I try to capture in my painting-installation
‘Byonce Is The New Black Madnna’. The three female forms depicted in
the work bear little resemblance to the star but are celebrated at the
centre of an aluminium panels pentagram, itself a symbol of
anti-religion. It’s a shrine but it’s not worship of any particular
star – it’s worship of the idea of worshipping stars. We can’t hope to
live in their image, because whatever it is will be replaced tomorrow.

These ideas of new religion and the interchangeable are explored
further in works such as ‘Olivia Palermo and her model boyfriend
Johannes Huebl.’ In this painting, Huebl is rendered a
boyfriend-shaped space of hyper-real colour, as if he’s been cut-out
and placed in some else’s fantasy. Palermo’s designer bag merges with
her own body to intensify this sense that the pair are not in complete
control of their image, and maybe even their identities.
Perhaps this idea of a new value system in constant flux is most
clearly condensed in the outstretched hand of the painting
‘Simple/Exchange’. We’re paying to be part of an alluring world – it’s
just hard to say what we’re paying, and how much world we’re getting

in return.

MORE

I paint mostly in oil and acrylic. My starting point is nearly always images found online – such as MySpace, Facebook, blogs, Google image searches – or from print magazines and newspapers.

I’m looking for images that have the potential to become something else than they are at the moment I find them. Transformation interests me – how people or things can change, but particularly how we can make them change from our viewpoint. As I spend time with the found image, new thoughts and possibilities are evoked and I experiment with potential additions, deformations and changes that will become part of a transformed image. These possibilities of enrichment in meaning excite me.

In a way my work process is quite open ended because I want the paintings to offer possibilities; make people ask questions of what they’re looking at – and the contemporary world surrounding us. So much of our reality is served to us in obvious, easy to understand forms – from food to information and entertainment. There’s a tendency to reduce our beliefs and thought processes to bite-size chunks, and for the media to imply that with each item we’re being served the only truth. Our lives are a lot less black and white than this, and with my paintings I’m often exploring sides to existence that are less exposed – darker, or more difficult to digest.

In each painting I’m also trying to apply a critical edge, investigating concepts such as modern slavery; ideals of beauty in relation to our consumer society; mysticism in an age of science; sexual expression; new religion and beyond. I aspire to evoke some sense of these ideas in the viewer but not for them to draw any obvious conclusions or statements. Instead I hope that they start to look for connections with the way they live, and they way they think others live.

I really value different people’s conflicting interpretations of a piece, and always aim to inspire dialogue between the viewer and the piece, and beyond. By creating series of paintings I attempt to take this further. As I place images from a series in a sequence, they influence each others’ meanings, and present possible storylines to the viewer.

Into the Black

”Violetta Villas“

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