Juan Villavicencio
Ensenada, 1986
He is a ceramic artist who investigates the boundaries between art, craft and design while questioning Mexican identity. He creates unique objects that reference Mexican curiosities or kitsch crafts found in Tijuana souvenir stores, such as Talavera and velvet sculptures. Villavicencio considers the role these crafts play in the construction, representation and commodification of American and Mexican identities. His work playfully deploys visual elements drawn from pre-Hispanic heritage, pop culture, traditional ceramic patterns, the natural world and even graffiti: he creates disjunctive and humorous juxtapositions. The artist often contrasts ideas of “authenticity” associated with handmade ceramics with the reality that many so-called “crafts” are mass-produced and bear little relation to the region. One of his series of works,vOscuranas, refers to velvet sculptures that could be found in stores near the U.S.-Mexico border.v The Oscuranas are abstract, high-fired, liquid-like ceramic forms covered in black velvet that seek to question volume, space, and gravity.
statement
I am an artist dedicated to exploring the connection between objects and their presence in specific places that society gives them relevance, or confers them an emotional, historical, aesthetic and sentimental character. I usually ask myself several questions about how other possibilities arise when combining, assembling and joining objects that have no apparent relationship with each other, placed in urban, natural or dreamlike environments, linking it with vegetation and animals that symbolize the existence of an ancient period before the appearance of human beings, geometric structures of civilizations that are present but that we cannot perceive, but that give. I explore my daily life as a resource to generate these artistic creations through photography, writing and historical references of surrealism, realism and expressionism.
During my attempt to expand the perception of ideas, I implemented techniques in drawing, painting and its various technical modalities, such as acrylic, oil, watercolor, pastel and aerosol, as a medium oriented to urban art. Photography is an essential element that links with writing to generate the concept, while sculpture is used to abstract forms of a specific interest in the work I intend to create.
The work is an instrument capable of generating questions about the reason for the symbols, the reason for the objects selected in certain environments, the notion of solitude, the notion of emptiness, the notion of the monumental, the strong, the weak, are timeless themes that have an identifiable value with the purpose of exploring horizons beyond the sense we perceive of them.
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