Santiago Villanueva

Founder: Marc Takahashi

Art conceived as an intimate experience of body and time, a quest for an internal portrait in which beauty becomes an essential interlocutor. In Barthes’ words, "a delicate fold through which we have pinched, promptly, the page of life, the silk of language". Nothing remains stable; there is a changing balance: transitions that depict the internal forces like an omen of what is bound to happen. Actions captured in the middle of a transformational process, inertia that can be considered as part of the development, or the will or the stimulus. These works are about actions, which can only be interpreted through the senses. Thus, they are not meant to provoke simple visual pleasure or mere tactile experiences. On the contrary, they are meant to stimulate desire, to seduce us until we sensorially penetrate the objects, until we can feel the emotions from a deeply private and subjective place. This whole concept, hence, is built and defined from its core as a duality of two languages that constantly interact: one of matter and one of senses. It is a sort of paradox used as a narrative tool, a soft skin of industrial manufacture, crystallizing the internal organic emotions. - Santiago Villanueva