On Wednesday, April 20 2016, at 6 pm, as part of Art Brussels’Gallery Night, the Galerie MLF | Marie-Laure Fleisch inaugurates its new space in Ixelles, the contemporary art district of Brussels par excellence. The opening show is the site-specific project of Santiago Reyes Villaveces Reside.
Next to its complex polysemy linked to its figurative use, the verb to reside (from the Latin residēre) also indicates the legal and administrative choice of a particular residence in a specific place; or more generally, it denotes the choice of a fixed abode, or a place where one sojourns for a more or less stable period. This last meaning of the verb to reside expresses the modus operandi of Santiago Reyes Villaveces to create this exhibition: both his sojourn in the Belgian capital and the specificity of the exhibition space determined the conceptual parameters of his work.
The research of Reyes Villaveces confronts itself with the Brazilian Neo-Concrete tradition and the Tropicália Movement, in specific the work of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, and the poetics of the fragment inspired by Jorge Luis Borges. From the former, he derives a sense of transitivity and precariousness of the work; from the latter, a concept of the fragment as a representation of an aesthetics of ruins, interpreted in a non-romantic sense.
The artist’s preferred medium is sculpture, of which he explores its various possibilities, analysing different categories and the physical structures of materials. Therefore, his work tends towards a reciprocal system, in which the relation between materials, their form and collocation in space are destitute from any hierarchical organisation. Its plastic vocabulary creates a minimalist language, expressed in what the Colombian artist defines as an “immanent/silent architectural sensibility”, traced from the precarious structures that form the daily routine of cities he lived and worked: Bogotá first and foremost, and in this specific case, Brussels.
Cities can be considered as never-ending building sites swarming with objects that express a relentless tension between their residual and structural state. These objects lie at the heart of the artist’s practice, making objets trouvées the primary materials of his work. In his process of creation, they play a transitory function: residues or fragments of former constructions and a wide range of materials intelligently assembled, rendered un-functional and simultaneously raised to the level of art work, are used to study the expressive and formal possibilities of objects, and their interaction with space and light.
Reyes Villaveces’s work stretches the physical limits of matter, challenging the concepts of scale, volume, weight, tension, gravity, surface, resistance, pressure, limits, perspective and depth. His sculptures are represented as singular and visually forceful instruments originating from a short circuit between matter and surface, from mass and structure, expressed both as the synthesis of form and proportion that each single work takes on in respect to the rest. In this way, a few simple elements, sharply positioned in the exhibition space, question the sense of perception, and as such activate a relation between the architecture of the exhibition space, the viewer’s perception, and the temporal element of the viewing experience.
