Guillermo Pérez Villalta returns to Sala Parés with "These last years"

Sala Parés presents, until October 29, the exhibition These last years by Guillermo Pérez Villalta who, after two decades without exhibiting in Barcelona, presents his first solo exhibition at Sala Parés.

The exhibition will occupy several spaces of the gallery and will exhibit works from the last ten years of the artist's production. Following the conceptual line of Pérez Villalta's most recent exhibitions in Madrid, the exhibition revolves around the idea of "classicity", a concept present in Western culture from antiquity to the present day and object of study, review and analysis by the artist.

Pérez Villalta deploys a language built on geometry, the contrast between bodies and the void, the meticulous study of light in space and delights in pictorial values - brushwork and color "with mixtures and glazes complexes of various tones to create rarefied lighting”. His painting is more abstract in its meaning or interpretation, diminishing the symbolic evocation of the subjects represented: perspectives taken to the limit, combined vanishing points, fantastic geometries, reinterpretations, ideal cities, dream visions and metaphysical environments. Those of an artistic nature (the pleasures of culture, beauty, the classic and the contemporary, abstraction and figuration, the real and the imaginary, truth and verisimilitude); others of a personal nature (reason and feeling, individual and collective, masculine and feminine, love and sex, solitude and companionship); and of a spiritual or philosophical order (sacred and profane, religions, rites, myths, beliefs, allegories, dreams). And like a shadow that covers everything, transience, eternity, melancholy for the passage of time.

Painter, writer, draftsman, engraver, designer of jewelry and objects, architect, set designer, sculptor and, in short, and as he likes to call himself, artist, Pérez Villalta deploys a language built from geometry, the contrast between bodies and void, the meticulous study of light in space and delights in pictorial values – brushwork and color “with complex mixtures and glazes of many tones to create a rarefied illumination”.

Born in Tarifa, Cádiz in 1948, Pérez Villalta began to study Architecture, although he abandoned it to devote himself to painting. He arrived in Madrid in 1968 and made himself known as a painter. With the cultural explosion in the city during 1980, he was immersed in the countercultural movement of the 'Movida Madrileña'. In his earliest work, the paintings were very colorful and had a strong Mannerist and Baroque influence, leading some experts to include them in the Neo-Mannerist school. He also designed scenographies, produced engravings and lithographs, worked with ceramics and bronze, and designed furniture and carpets. In 1985, he was awarded the National Fine Arts Award, and in 2006, the Gold Medal for Merit in Fine Arts.