Guillermo Pérez Villalta (Tarifa, 72 years old) retired more than 30 years ago to his grandparents’ house in the upper part of the city, on Calle de los Silos. He had integrated the hard core of the New Madrid Figuration, although always free of canons. His style, which starts from his architectural vocation, earned him the National Prize for Plastic Arts in 1985, in the midst of postmovement. He locked himself away from the glory. He veered toward a “less conspicuous” painting to be inconspicuous. He converted the first floor of the house into a workshop and library. And the kitchen, in a rest room: a fanciful room painted with Pompeian scenes with a sauna next to it. His grandparents’ bedroom remained intact, the furniture arranged as usual; I wanted to keep something native to the house. “In the lower part we made a bar that was beautiful, they took many photos of it: my ex-partner was a bartender and I did it for him, but the bar broke and everything broke,” he recalls.
The bar was transformed into the Guillermo Pérez Villalta art gallery. One thousand works chosen after each exhibition. From mythology to Walt Disney. From psychedelia and pop to neo-modern baroque. “Until I came up with a nefarious idea: donate my work to Andalusia, on the condition that it be kept in this house.” Paintings, drawings, sculptures and furniture came out six years ago to be displayed at the Cartuja Museum of Contemporary Art. And they have not returned. “They made my house easier, but I was left with nothing. I continue with my holes, waiting for them to return ”, he says in Madrid, where he came to finish his exhibition Art as a labyrinth, organized by the Community of Madrid and inaugurated on February 18 in the Sala Alcalá 31, and where the jewelry collection that has been developed at the request of and in collaboration with the Suarez firm is also launched.
The artist’s relationship with the bureaucracy is complex. “It’s a drama, I hope it gets fixed. The donation was never signed. I had a problem with the director of the center, who ideologically is elsewhere: he likes videos, installations …, he has no love for painting. The same thing happens to me with Manuel Borja-Villel, the director of the Reina Sofía, who belongs to the same school. The person in charge of an art museum has to know about art. And sometimes they show incredible gaps. They are very conceptual and dogmatic. Painting is meaningless to them. They prefer to research documents, and this is fine to make a book, but it is not a joy to behold ”.
In the capital he misses the sea. Village life. And he drags a lament: “Many friends are dying. Fernando Huici remains, but he is very retired. With Almodóvar I am a lifelong friend, and I participated in Crazy… crazy… ¡fólleme Tim! Then I did extra in some other, until I came to Tarifa. We see each other often because he collects my work, but he’s always busy, just like Alaska ”.
He felt a precocious vocation for architecture, but he abandoned the career because he did not imagine in the day to day. “The decision corresponds to a very specific moment; It was in the Moroccan city of Essaouira when, when crossing a stream, I thought: ‘When I get to the other side I will be a painter.’
Paint every day. “The head is a perfect computer.” It plays music from Motown or the Beatles, sometimes the radio. He can’t stand reggaeton. “What if I paint Veronese? Ah, who could! No, I don’t have that domain. Today there are people who paint well, but today painting does not fly over the spirit of time, the Zeitgeist. I feel more and more out of time, I am aware of it. And I don’t have much hope for the future. Humanity does not fit ”.
Keep the mobile in a drawer. His thing is to observe, read, think, hold his head with his hand: the posture of melancholy. Even when I’m painting, my head keeps thinking. I am a thinker who paints instead of writing ”. From the Greeks to the Enlightenment. Góngora, as an undulating poet. Or Epicurus and his meditations: “I know that only this life exists; therefore, I am not going to waste it. At the age of 22, I already had this awareness.
He assures that humanity is getting stunned, that mass culture is not culture, but only mass. There are many things in the present that he does not like, but he does not fight them. “Things are as they are, and that’s it,” he reasons. He defines himself as melancholic, and says that he finds her beautiful: “The depre, no; but melancholy, yes: it is bittersweet and beautiful ”.
The author defends another story about the history of art: “It must be understood as a kind of flowering. I tend to like things that people don’t like, like the high Renaissance, the symbolism or mannerism of Pontormo or Bronzino. For me, impressionism is not the best of the 19th century ”.
In his work, dream narratives and the free association of ideas appear as visions. Drugs? “I never took them for fun, but to think. It is like entering an alpha state in which you have consciousness but you are in anticipation of the dream and you can pre-analyze it. LSD has a dangerous side, I cut it long ago, I experienced bad trips. Now I consume hashish, although I never work smoked, only some nights, to imagine and think ”. He does not want to define beauty, which he approaches only through the senses: “It is a kind of very deep value, like the afterlife of an orgasm. It is a degree of pleasure that fills your entire body. Something that man deeply desires ”.
And speaking of sex: “I am clearly homosexual and a lover of the masculine. But, fortunately, today any sexual option is accepted. Stop doing drama! I didn’t start having sex until I was 30. For me it has been important to have lived an adolescence and youth without external sex, but inside me I invented everything I invented. It has a lot to do with art, investigating your pleasures without any coercion ”, he says.
According to the curator of the exhibition Art as a labyrinth, Óscar Alonso Molina, the hundred works that make up the show reflect the disorientation of the present. Memory, chaos, science, art, homosexuality, narcissism, mannerism, baroque, androgyny. Pérez Villalta projected it from the geometric study of the floor of the Antonio Palacios building that houses the exhibition, raising a labyrinth. “There is no chronological journey. We mix recent paintings with work from the seventies. We face opposites. We left empty corners, illuminated; it is part of the blank sheet. The concept of emptiness is very present. That labyrinth has a center, which is a temple. And there is a ring within the smallest circle, which is the void ”. Borges, a collector of labyrinths, stated: “We do not know if the universe has a center; if it were so, we would be saved, there would be an architecture in the face of chaos ”. For the Cadiz painter, the Minotaur is the reflection of oneself. The me weird.
In this second pandemic year the artist has not stopped. He was chosen by Suarez Jewelry to make a collection inspired by his work. “It was a unique experience. I have been left with my mouth open: extraordinary workshops, wonderful stones, technical precision … Some are taken from my drawings, others are elements of paintings: floral details, botany ”. The fascination for jewels coexists with the artist since childhood. As a child, when he was ill, his mother let him play with her jewelry box. Today he treasures a library full of jewelry books. Among the pieces in the collection, choose a pendant with an empty circle as a favorite. “It has touched me. But it is not affordable for my pocket ”.
“Hasn’t he made any money?”
“I’ve never been in the business of making money.” And I have not liked the luxuries. My luxury is my life, to do what I want; the rest is superfluous. I have been detached. With having to live … And I have not promoted myself. I have not wanted to be famous: fame is tacky.
–
