WIlliam Villalongo

Jubilee and Rhombus riff on late Baroque idylls with women at leisure; painting, bathing, and playing.  Turnabout for Villalongo comes not only in the appropriation of the 18th century motif, but in the Modernists masks sported by many of the women.  With a nod to the ladies of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Villalongo substitutes masks inspired by the work of Gene Davis, Robert Ryman, and Ad Reinhardt for the African masks that inspired Picasso and his peers. This turns the tables on the fraught history of Modernism and Primitivism, calling attention to their appropriation of African visual language, color, and geometry. The artist remixes Western notions of exoticism and abstraction. He says of this series, “my goal is to orchestrate a conversation between history and art which could give us the progressive discussions of the future.”