Leoncio Villanueva presents his new solo show “A los Apus” | PHOTOS

“It is difficult to say that my work it is abstract. I pretend that this is the case, but symbols and their mysteries always win out over me even though I have stripped the object of its precise representation, as if hiding from the viewer what it really was “says the teacher Leoncio Villanueva (Lima, 1947), displaying the series of canvases that organize a new individual exhibition in his already long artistic career, the one that formally began in 1971 when he graduated from the School of Fine Arts to establish a continuous line from France, Mexico and Belgium to in 2015, when he returned to Lima to settle permanently.

“I have been working with the hills and sandbanks for many years, but when I was inspired by the platforms I became aware of the Apu (sacred hill of the Andes) both in its spiritual content and in its forms, since I could cut it as if it were a piece of clay. Extracting a mountain from the landscape to turn it into an object that can be worked in many ways. As if it were a piece of ceramic, a sculpture or enclosing it inside a cube as an incubator, where you could see the birth and growth of new hills. This is how we observe the Earth, as manipulative surgeons of the planet “, dice.

And indeed: the surgeon Villanueva establishes a parallel between the shamanic vision and an environment where everything he touches comes to life. Hills, rivers, trees and large stones. Then the magic comes to work. The sorcerer and his charms. Villanueva will illustrate this spell in his own way, turning flat and spatial forms into new referential vestiges endowed with shape and color. In this duality – abstraction and the spiritual world – he places the viewer in front of a harmonious whole from which emanates a rare balance between heart and mind, emotion and reason. A plastic territory that moves between expressionism and geometry.

Living nature

Notoriously influenced by the Tahuantinsuyan trapezoid of Milner Cajahuaringa (1932 – 2017), teacher and guide especially in the technique of color degradation. “What interested him was the floating color, the shape and the symbolic of the trapezoid. But I sensed that there was an ideology getting in the way of his work. Ideologies in art is something that I can’t stand, for posters it’s fine. My bet was to find in the surreal world possibilities of expression. As in Rauschenberg’s work, where each image lives on its own, without connection to the others, and yet forms a coherent universe of incoherence. That is a form of abstraction that I also intend ”.

To his inevitable kinship with nationals such as Tilsa, Llona or Shinki, would you add any new painter? “In my early days, it was Tilsa who inspired me with a good number of works, very different from hers of course. Also Cajahuaringa. Not my friend Llona, ​​although we agree on some forms of composition, but it is a coincidence. I admire his work a lot and Ramiro is a great artist. De Shinki will not believe what I am going to say, nor will everyone who reads these lines. The triangles, pyramids, hills, cacti, the maguey and spirals were made by me before him, despite being older than me for 15 years. What happens is that I was 28 years out of Peru. I am happy to assume that I have influenced Shinki’s style and that many would take it as blasphemy “.

If you are asking me what my art is, I could tell you that it has a close relationship with magic as opposed to technological or sacred versus science. All nature that surrounds us, everything is intelligent, everything vibrates, everything has consciousness. A cactus whose leaves are human faces, a long cactus leaf whose spines are actually guns. I cannot speak about my works, since it is the images that speak for me “.

More information

Place: The galery.

Schedule: Monday through Friday from 11 am to 7 pm

Address: Count of Monclova 255 – San Isidro.

Date: Until December 22