Darío Villalba is a compulsory reference for understanding the development of art after the informalist generation of the 1950´s, as well as the main link in Spanish art, with the international vanguard movements, who´s postulates he subverts.
Since the middle of the 1960´s he has approached the problematic of the latest artistic movements with a personal view, using very prematurely, photography as a way of painting. This unique use of photography, places him in a privileged position. Has to be clarified in order not to result in a gratuitous affirmation. As is well known, photography or "mass-media" was employed in general terms, for pop art as a spreading and trivializing of the image of consumption, and for conceptual art, as a questioning of the essence of art or as a clue or testimony to an idea. Villalba does the exact opposite. Paradoxically, he uses photographic trauma, cold and distancing, like paint. That is to say as a vehicle for transmitting all types of attitudes or states of mind. Darío Villalba since 1957 has stressed the poetry of language.
This radical and revolutionary attitude of Villalba presented to us, in the 60´s, photographs with hardly any participation, which relaxed the idea of painting-painting (painting with paints) as a support for the excessive, and was a de-contextualization of the photographic trauma of the then considered artistic frame.
When in the full bloom of pop art, conceptual and, later, land-art, body-art, etc., he presented us with a decisive and saturated iconography of emotional readings, relying on the photograph to support this -it is evident that at a first glance he is deceiving us. In reality, his innovation is a radical unique achievement on a very personal uses of photography as a path that opens and makes possible a return to the spirit of painting, far away from whatever reductionism brought about by the technique. This character prematurely seen at the beginning of the 70´s, links perfectly with the most interesting experiments of the new young generation.
During the 80´s, his process became progressively more complicated, in a formal self-analysis that ends in metalanguages in 1992 and is put to use in a will of introspection. The possibility of a painting as a support for the excessive has made his work overflow and employ diverse themes such as the recuperation of museum pieces, images, and fetishes that are almost autobiographical, or ambiences that are lyrical or even intimate.
Right now, in his work, there co-exists painting-painting (painting with paint) and photography (or negation of the photography) objects, installations, sculptures, etc., without "the corpus" of his work being even slightly discordant, because the acronologic as well as the sabotage of languages or style facing up against non-style (without either being the protagonist) are essential characteristics of his trajectory.
His first photographic experiments centre on photographs taken in London at the end of the 50´s, that were later used in the year 1972.
Villalba appeared on the international artistic scene, to strong recognition in 1970 at the XXXV Biennal of Venice when he presented his well-know "encapsulations" sculptures with a transparent, bubble made of thansparent pink methacrylate that contained people in their interiors. The photography there was taken as the base material that paint would later replace.
In 1971, photography clearly takes centre stage in his work. At this time he makes what couls be called the second generation of encapsulations, apart from the triptychs, fragmentation, games with micro and microscopic scales, etc. that obtained, in 1973, the International Prize for Painting in the XII Biennal of Sao Paulo. This second generation of encapsulations was already free of any type of chromatism and used methacrylate, aluminium and the black and white photographic fabric as the base materials. In the 70´s, the work arose interest form various European museums such as Frankfurter Kunstverein (1974), Louisiana Museum (Denmark) in 1975, Boymans van Beuningen Museum (1975), Stadt Museum de Bochum (1975), Palais de Beaux-Arts (Brussels) in 1976, Heidelberg Kunstverein (1976), Künstlerhaus de Viena (1977) y el Sonja Henie-Niels Onstand Foundations (Norway) in 1980, with each one being giving a monographic exposition.
In the 1980´s Villalba had relevant expositions outside of Spain; particularly standing out were the collective works of Acquisition Priorities: Aspects of Postwar Painting in America. Recent European Painting in The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1983); An International Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture in the MOMA in New York (1984); Metropolitan Museum of New York; Fifty Years of Collecting: An Anniversary Selection in The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation (1987) and Five Centuries of Spanish Art: The New Imagination. The years 70-80 in the Musée d´Art Moderne of the City of París (1987).
In 1983 he received the National Award for Painting in Spain "for his capacity for synthetic integration in permanent dialogue with the international vanguard trends".
The IVAM put together and anthological exposition, Darío Villalba 1964-1994, revealing his radical visionary attitude in the 1970´s wich clarifies a great part of the aesthetic attitudes of the present new young generation.
This show will travel to various European museums. Its itinerary has already commenced in Oslo, where 200 photographic fabrics and sculptures were inaugurated on the 23rd of september, 1995 in the National Museum of Contemporary Art.
His Basic Documents should specially be highlited. 1800 works of different sizes, done since 1957 to the present. He has created this oeuvre in his yearly one or two months stays in London. A great intimate laboratory of images that reviels what lies under the superflous. They were shown in the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela in the spring of 2001.
He is electected a member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando on the 12th of march of 2002. He reads his entry speech on the 17th of november of 2002.
He is awarded by the King of Spain the Gold Medal for the Merit in Fine Arts in 2002.
