SAÚL VILLA
Of Bombs and Bunkers
essay by Blanca González Rosas

Saúl Villa (Mexico 1958) broaches a fascinating aspect of the contemporary perspective and artistic creation in the three series that he now presents: the relationship between technology, the perception of reality, and the artistic manufacture of the traditional genres of art. A relationship imperceptible and complex that treacherously confuses the real and the fictional. A powerful relationship that rationally deconstructs the technological image to reconstruct it through painting and printmaking.

The confrontation between the act of seeing and its representation has become one of the most sensitive aspects of today’s art; especially since technological images have invaded our visual environment in the form of photographs, videos, films and television.

One artistic response to this invasion has been the re-interpretation of technological images, which, in the case of Saul Villa, has not been limited to the artistic appropriation but also has expanded to technological intervention and reconstruction.

Using a complex procedure in which the technological and artistic dimensions are fused, Villa digitally deconstructs photographic images, converting them into strange maps made up of organic forms of different sizes, which, with algorithmic precision, receive a particular color coding. The silhouette of these maps is the basis of the pictorial image, and the artist, after transferring it to different formats and surfaces, intervenes pictorially in numerous formal territories, respecting the defined chromatic code. A humanist procedure that constructs its own discourse fusing the technological and artistic dimensions.

Without abandoning the poetic expressionism or his preference for portraits and landscapes that have always characterized his work, in Bombs and Bunkers, the painter presents three series that take as a point of departure photographic images of nuclear experiments undertaken in 1959 in the United States: explosions, interiors of an anti-nuclear bomb shelter and the destruction of a house.

The series “Portrait of the atom as a young bomb” is startling for the pictorial bluntness of the pieces, in which Villa reinterprets images of the first moments – the first millisecond – of a nuclear explosion. With ten large-format paintings mediated by thick and expressionist brushstrokes in different tones of gray, the artist generates a strong visual vibration that silently evokes the destructive energy – without ethic or moral pretensions – that such an event generates.

Totally different is the series of paintings in small format named “Bombs and Bunkers.” Taken from a series of photographs of the interior spaces of an anti-nuclear bomb shelter designed by the United States government, the rational and falsely indifferent pictorial realization of these images manages to destabilize the apparent normality of the represented spaces, demonstrating, with scientific coldness, the perversity and cynicism that political power can engender.

Indifference and perversity is what is emphasized in the series of prints – etchings in black ink – with the title “On the test of the effects of the explosion of a nuclear device on a house”. This work reconstructs the total destruction of an ordinary human shelter: the house.

In the work of Saúl Villa, these series stand out for their artistic-conceptual statement that seeks to present reality without interpreting it, and especially show, through the integration of science, technology, art, perception and ethics which, without pushing it, that all ethical proposals are imminently aesthetic: an explosion can be as beautiful as it is perverse.