William Villalongo

Known for irreverent riffs on the art historical "muse," William Villalongo has made episodic paintings and works on paper which underscore historical erasure and reimagined narratives. Here Villalongo turns his attention to the Black male figure.

At a time when current events and statistics reflect a social reality of limited expectations, contingency, and disproportionate fear for the Black body, Villalongo reconsiders and modifies that body to circumvent corporeality. Within the dark tones of these meditations on physiology, the artist uses metaphors of invisibility, nature, and reformation as necessary conditions of Black male being. Like fallen autumn leaves, Villalongo's figures navigate their world, subject to an unpredictable wind - piling, spinning, re-collecting and migrating. Figures float in space, dreamlike, liminal, and ill-defined much like the accumulated notions of what it is to be Black in the world.