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Curator Claudio Gonzalez began a visual dialogue between Alejandra Villasmil and D. Dominick Lombardi when he asked them both to exhibit together in his gallery. Both artists write about art as well, so the potential for an interesting linear dialogue between the two was too good to pass up. Here are a few excerpts form a number of online discussions on how the show would look. |
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Artist to Artist: Strange Brew – Alejandra Villasmil and D. Dominick Lombardi
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Curator Claudio Gonzalez began a visual dialogue between Alejandra Villasmil and D. Dominick Lombardi when he asked them both to exhibit together in his gallery. Both artists write about art as well, so the potential for an interesting linear dialogue between the two was too good to pass up. Here are a few excerpts form a number of online discussions on how the show would look.
D. Dominick Lombardi: Hey Alejandra. I’m thinking, after the meeting we had with Claudio, that we will focus the show around four of our larger works. The two I am thinking of, for me, are “Graffoo” paintings: Tattooed Landscape #23 and Tattooed Landscape #25. You know how it is, we always want to show our latest works, and these seem to fit the show’s theme. I also like the timidity or vulnerability of my characters against some of the more self-assured elements in your works. Any thoughts?
Alejandra Villasmil: Yes, I was actually thinking that there is an interesting dialogue between your “Graffoo” paintings and my “Escort Ads” and “Dress to Kill” series. In both of my series, the characters suffer a transformation—from being these professedly menacing beasts to becoming these comical, sometimes ridiculous, entities. The transformation occurs with ornamentation, that is, by making up and disguising these characters found in printed matter. The escorts become sexy, mythological creatures and the medieval beasts become sweet monsters dressed in festive costumes. We do this everyday. We live immersed in the artifice and appearance of the media and of consumer society. Your characters are sort of also byproducts or victims of transformation and of external forces. In these "post-apocalyptic" times, to borrow an expression from you, our characters transmute into amusing, lovely beings.
DDL: Absolutely. Your figures have the intricacies to soften them, and mine have the physical disfunctions—both are ways of dressing up the less desirable, so to speak. This is also a way of humanizing such undesirables, or maybe it is about becoming less afraid of the unknown. Is that we are striving for? And also, nothing creeps me out more than what may be in store for us in the future—the scariest unknown. But, we can control that fear to a certain extent, we can escape from it in the studio by creating our own world where beasts, or what we might normally see as problematic beings, are represented as compelling or even as mesmerizing. That’s the key to your work, I think. It grabs you in the gut, in the subconscious or somewhere in the body or mind, and it keeps you there through the detail or the narrative, or both. And, since my art feeds off the narrative side of things, our work should communicate in many strange new ways.
AV: Yes! That is exactly what we’ll do: control our fears by transforming the disturbing reality—and in some cases the unknown—into a pleasant experience.
It is like bringing the beauty out of ugly times. We are doing it by decorating, even though that sounds like a superficial gesture. I embellish “Escorts” with fake gems, you tattoo Little Orphan Annie, a comic character with a tragic life. Now, whilst my characters are real characters with a fantasy twist (astronauts, dinosaurs, medieval beasts, escorts), yours seem to be completely invented. Indeed, you have this family tree of imaginary characters—you call it a “hierarchal society.” That is a narrative that most of my work lacks. It is like I create this “photo moment,” or frozen frame, and you construct this whole story.
DDL: Actually, the story comes to me as I work on the forms. Early on, in the first 80 or 90 works, I was making reverse paintings (acrylic on Plexiglas). A very time consuming, fastidious process of layering and organizing unmodulated colors—cutting every layer’s edge, sometimes as many as four or five layers of paint, with razor blades and Exacto knives and making sure each edge matched up with the previous ones. With all this time immersed in the works, the characters began to become known to me, beyond their appearance. Character traits emerged. And, what looked like gross mutations began to have a purpose, making life more livable, even happy. It may seem strange, but it was like the characters and I had developed a relationship. Actually that is strange, but true.
You hear this from time to time with artists—how characters can come to life. You know that story where Michelangelo supposedly spoke to his sculpture of Moses, demanding that he speak back to him? I even hear, from time to time, that he hammered that Moses statue on the foot as he tried in vain to get him to speak. Anyway, that relationship between the artist and the subject is easily expanded or extrapolated in an active mind that is burdened by tedious technique. Then there is a collective continuum of creative energy, or thoughts and ideas that pass back and forth through all time, to those who look to or feed off their subconscious. That is where the idea of the Post Apocalyptic Tattoo came from. I am making a conjecture that the images that I am automatically drawing and then painting or sculpting are from that continuum, put there by one or two individuals who are actual people. Only, in this instance, they are future tattoo artists. Weird, sure, but it feels right. That direct connection is gone now. I had it from late 1998 to maybe around 2003 or 2004, so now I move on. I am currently making “Graffoos” as I look back on my personal history as well as onto some of the things that I saw and felt in the environs of a future world. I am completing the narrative settings, you could say.
