'El espacio de las imágenes', Keke Vilabelda
Artist: Keke Vilabelda
Dates: April 06th 2024 to May 17th 2024
When I first came across Keke Vilabelda’s work a few years ago, I borrowed a quote from Rémy Zaugg. In it, he refers to how the evidence is by definition transparent and imperceptible. Indeed, the evidence is luminous and therefore blinding; in Zaugg’s words, it is the invisible cement of reality. Hence the artist’s task is to cast a shadow over it, to meditate on its cracks, to invoke its wear and tear. Back then, Vilabelda used layers of paint to reflect the sediments of urban life, enjoying this residual process that leads many artists to work with the remembrance of places and experiences. It was an erratic, accidental journey, somewhere between the anthropology of urban life and an intrinsic investigation of painting and the pictorial. A kind of serendipitous act, like a ruined building which is nothing more than the experience itself – as Derrida points out, reminding us that the act of inheriting something involves creating memories, underlining the performativity implicit in this expression.
Today the artist’s evocation of the accidental persists, between errors in physical form, such as cracks, and digital failures that we know as “glitches”. Nevertheless, his search for these accidents is now more restrained, more conscious. In this case, Vilabelda’s use of dérive and frotagge as procedural tools have given way to a keener scrutiny of perception. If his work previously grew out of an unfocused vision, the artist has now taken this scrutiny of perception to the extreme: he envelops viewers in the image space, thus turning them into spectators of something that is still happening. Sculpture, photography, the physical and the digital – all of these elements are present in his painting, but it’s not just painting. It’s painting based on an image transfer that turns the painting into a screen. In the meantime, our gaze remains trapped while paradoxically continuing to be displaced. As in a video game or a Turner painting, the image refuses to be pinned down. Perspectives fade away, the horizon floats. We are led into an abyss that we experience head-on, in suspension. Viewers are left no room for certainty – they cannot complete the image.
Keke Vilabelda cultivates a style of painting based on resonance. I recall Hito Steyerl talking about Turner as an example of how the linear perspective is destroyed: in his paintings, viewers can barely perceive the horizon and thus lose their stable footing. In Vilabelda’s paintings, too, the linear perspective vanishes. Here, the physical crack is a fissure in perception. The painting is contained within the canvas, but the pictorial also reaches beyond its limits. The horizon exists, but it floats – it’s there, although it also disappears. The viewer’s gaze becomes tense. The image becomes dense. Because the painting emerges from the gaps while the cracks flirt with the representational order, filling it full of holes. Emptiness and matter combine in the same way as what we see and what we touch. Because the emptiness also becomes matter; far from being passive, it vindicates itself as an active background. The cement becomes lighter and more viscous. It is eroded in the virtual space to sculpt distance, as Maurice Blanchot said of Giacometti. This is painting that falls away, shifts and becomes rigid, leading us into an absolute void, transforming itself into matter and image. It conveys the instability of a world dominated by a solid wall of images, of which only a handful will survive while the majority are doomed to disappear from our gaze. Keke Vilabelda’s painting evokes the destruction of the space which, time and again, produces cracks from the infrathin; the painting functions as a transitory surface, a fragmentary experience, repeatedly forcing the viewer into an active process of construction, assuming the fluidity of the present in a world where the only certainty is movement.
Keke Vilabelda feels comfortable in these in-between spaces of incessant metamorphosis. Now it is not the canvases which absorb their surroundings, nor does Vilabelda have to move sheets of methacrylate around to create the wefts; the process is different, less physical. It retains the same interest in gesture, but is more subtle. The energy of the world, taken from real spaces and transferred to the studio, where many things happen, continues entropically, restlessly, embracing a premeditated disorder, as when Michel Serres uses his poetic intuition to determine that systems work because they do not work, in other words, when the dysfunctional is essential for functioning. Keke Vilabelda invokes the impossible, triggered by the beauty of the accidental. If philosophy, as Hegel asserted, is an era expressed in ideas, the same could be said of Keke Vilabelda’s painting: an unfocused vision of the world in line with the thinking of Juhani Pallasmaa, who points out that focused vision places us in confrontation with the world while peripheral vision envelops us, something that I have always thought lies behind Keke Vilabelda’s way of operating.
Although if there is one thing that is always around the corner, it is the accidental, as Miró confessed in a letter to Matisse: he would find random objects on the beach, unwittingly attracted to them by their magnetic force, and which would later produce in him a “poetic shock”, an artistic bolt from the blue that he would turn into a painting. I believe that this metaphorical shift capable of interpreting or distilling reality, this sort of destruction that envelops us in its strange and distant vibration, has always been present in Keke Vilabelda’s work. Now, however, it has taken on uncomfortable dimensions, where the first impressions of his paintings are even more disconcerting. That is why we should take our time when approaching his painting, allowing the image to unfold as we get closer. Gadamer calls it verweilen, an unhurried waiting that reveals the inner aspects of the work.
Personally, I am not surprised by the meaning in Vilabelda’s latest paintings, which a few years ago I likened to Tarkovsky’s cinematic universe, where we feel the world sliding past us with blurred edges, our gaze suspended in conflict. But I am surprised by the result, which singles out his work and makes it extraordinary, an exercise that truly forces viewers to see his work for themselves and to grasp its dimensions, this image space where seeing stops us from noticing that we’re missing something. In the words of Georges Didi-Huberman, when “seeing is loss”. Painting that outlines many other possible forms.
Keke Vilabelda (Valencia, 1986)
The work of Keke Vilabelda focuses on the processes of construction and transformation of the natural landscape and contemporary urban space. Through painting, he explores our changing relationship with the environment and new ways of observing it. His works are constructed through the interaction of multiple techniques and a wide range of materials, such as cement or acrylic, as well as photographic and digital media, generating a unique but diverse language.
There is an almost alchemical component in which each process, each material used, is chosen and manipulated carefully to reveal its essence in the details, in the beauty of the accident, in the trace of the passage of time. In this sense, his work is an exercise that seeks to halt the frenetic pace of our accelerated transit, to better understand our physical and material relationship with the landscape we inhabit.
Graduated from UPV in 2009. Master’s in Arts from Central Saint Martins London in 2011. He has had solo exhibitions in Spain, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Peru, Poland, Colombia, Mexico, Portugal, and Australia. Additionally, he has participated in important fairs and collective exhibitions in China, Germany, the United States, Italy, France, Portugal, and Switzerland.
He has received numerous awards and grants from institutions, including SAATCHI New Sensations, BMW Ibérica, La Real Academia de San Carlos, the City Council of Valencia, and the Government of Spain. He has undertaken residencies at Casa Wabi Oaxaca, Casa Velázquez de Madrid, ZonaSeis México, and Fundación Miró Mallorca.
His work is housed in multiple public and private collections, including IVAM, MOLAA, CDAN, CAAC, Fundación Mainel, and Fundación Cargmignac.