Monstruos
a solo show by Nicolas Villamizar

26 April 2024 — 26 June 2024


OVERVIEW

I vaguely remember that I spent half of my childhood alone,
my father died very young, my mother travelled all the time for work and I was too shy to make friends. My imagination became my great ally, I spent hours creating imaginary characters, fantastic creatures based on books, movies, comics and fictional stories.

Marked by the magical realism of Gabriel Garcia Márquez,
I always had a hard time distinguishing between reality and fantasy.
It became an obsession to create my own mythology, an ecosystem of goddesses, angels and fantastic animals that would save me from an unpleasant reality and a devastating everyday life.

These paintings are a tribute to those monsters that live in each of us; It is an exercise of returning to the subconscious, in the most innocent, naive and almost primitive way. Playing with shapes, building figures and touching an almost abstract universe, appealing to the most
hidden and forgotten self, I turn strokes into emotions and
colors into expression and personality. We came to play and
we are here to dream big.

BRIGHT

A metaphor for life itself, where this mythology of fantastic
characters is nothing more than a representation of human
emotions, dreams, desires, passions and the will to be alive. Always
in motion and with the same chromatic range, these paintings
are inspired by antique cave paintings, appealing to the most
primitive side of the human being.

BLACK

Inspired by Goya’s black paintings, these drawings symbolise
the darkest corners of our being, the fears, frustrations, pain
and internal struggle of a person to move forward and get out
of the darkness. Rough lines, incomprehensible figures and
erratic spots of color make up this series of images that come
from the underworld of trauma.



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