THE ART OF CAMOUFLAGE – INTERVIEW WITH DANILLO GIMENES VILLA
When we contact an artist, we always ask them to send us a portfolio of their work, so that we do not arrive unprepared to interview them, and of all the ones we have seen so far, Danillo Villa's was the one that caught my attention the most, because it is articulated as a true account of himself, of the experience of his being an artist.
I will not hide from you that it was not easy to fully understand the sixty three pages that make up this "memoir," but with each page I discovered a new vision of his art.
Danillo Gimenes Villa, is an artist, university professor and curator, creator of the Arte Londrina call, which aims to promote the flow of art between Londrina and the rest of the country.
He has always been highly stimulated to art from an early age, but the awareness that art would be a mainstay in his life came from his encounter with drawing in college classes. Drawing became a central point of his production, almost a place of refuge, where he felt comfortable.
" drawing is much less project and much more action."
But drawing is not his only medium of creation; in fact, his production also includes installations and sculptures, daughters of a chance encounter or an important moment.
Eu te darei o ceu meu bem
"I will give you the sky my love" translated is more or less like this, but it is a mere lie as a phrase.
No one is willing to give the sky to someone else.
The central object is this blanket that bears the above phrase in the center and is thrown over and over again into the sky, almost as if to become a cloud, but each time, it inexorably falls to the ground.
This work is repurposed in various other contexts, turning into plush paintings, business cards, giant posters.
Pinocchio:
Pinocchio relates to "eu te darei o ceu meu bem," because he is the character who, when he tells a lie, alters his own body.
A third of the artist's real height, he represents the naive person who observes life and lies, even about himself, and uses this lie as a creative structure; it is the lie that determines actions and the limits of them.
The search for mimicry
Have you ever read "Kassel does not invite logic" ? It is one of my favorite books ever!
It is the story of the writer Enrique Vila-Matas who is invited to Documenta to describe his visit to the fair, but this writing action he has to perform inside a Chinese restaurant, the Dschingis Khan, the name is already a whole program, in a kind of totally nonsensical performance that leads the protagonist to face a moment of continuous anxiety. In the first ninety-four pages of the book, Enqrique describes the anguish of having to sit in a place totally unsuitable for writing and having to do so while people come and go from the restaurant and curious people try to peek at his work.
"[...] I began to devise a plan so that none of those in the Dschingis Khan who wanted to peek at my work would get the slightest idea of what I was writing. For this purpose I invented a character very different from me: a writer with two problems; a person obsessed, haunted by a couple of stories, [...] And since this Barcelonian writer would be a wimp and would be afraid that his computer would be stolen, he would write them exclusively with a notebook-say, a red notebook, my own-why did I have to look for a different notebook when I could save myself the expense, even the mental expense?"
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But why do I mention this? Not because of a simple chance, but because of the fact that Danillo uses the same mimicry/immersion for his drawing that Enrique sought in his writing.
Observing the unfolding of actions and translating them into a sheet of paper is the goal of both of them, but outside gazes bother them so much that they seek the best hiding place to enact their work. Protagonism is left aside, the focal point is the drawing, and with it the total immersion in the surroundings.
Born from this action, which I call mimicry, are many of Villa's street drawings, such as "caçando Opalas."
Opala is an American car designed and produced at the turn of the 1960s and 1970s and sold exclusively in South America. The artistic research begins with the artist's memory of the years when his grandfather had an Opala and drove it around the city streets. From this memory comes a real hunt for the Opala, causing Danillo to go out on the streets of the city in search of this ancient machine, like a rare shark to be spotted.
In the "hunt," he runs into all kinds of situations, including being mugged by a little girl who asks him to draw a picture, even posing and taking away with him this precious loot that was his portrait.
"Through mimicry it is possible to have a horizontal look at actions, all of which happen at the same time, and all of which deserve equal attention and respect, because they can all be either very good things or threats."
