WILLIAM VILLALONGO

Susan Inglett Gallery is pleased to present WILLIAM VILLALONGO’s Black Menagerie, 7 September through 14 October 2023. The artist’s seventh solo exhibition with the gallery Black Menagerie was inspired by research done during a recent residency at the American Academy in Rome. A reception for the artist will be held...

In this recent series, Villalongo uses the medium to explore how to best represent the Black subject against the backdrop of race in America. These combined images create a portrait from ecological and cultural histories, emphasizing diaspora, deep time, freedom, beauty, and transformation. Drawing parallels to natural metamorphosis, Villalongo suggests an evolution of Black identity—a caterpillar enters a chrysalis, emerging later as a butterfly or rocks, compressed over millennia, transforming into stunning crystals.

Known for irreverent riffs on the art historical “muse,” William Villalongo has made episodic paintings and works on paper, which underscore historical erasure and master narratives of desire. In his fifth solo exhibition at Susan Inglett Gallery, the artist turns his attention to the black male figure, while returning to his signature cut velvet paper works. This new body of work suggests a re-imagining of the black male figure at a time when current events and statistics reflect a social reality of limited expectations, contingency, and disproportionate fear.

William Villalongo invites the viewer to return to his magical Otherworld, offering us edgy, multifaceted vignettes framed and softened by floral and velvet flocked borders. The artist layers his canvas with figures and narratives that allow for multiple paths of entry. Villalongo’s paintings are ultimately visions of modernity’s possibilities. His allusions to African masks, and Renaissance perspective, suggests a world of mythological and pedagogical continuities.

Challenging the notion that socially or politically charged content cannot coexist with Beauty and Form, these twelve artists skillfully employ imagination, observation and humor to produce works that engage the viewer with thought and feeling. Informed by a particularly American experience and diverse cultural backgrounds, the artists (conceptually) tow a line between their local environments and a global existence. Lines between form and content do not exist or are blurred purposefully to insist on an art that both interrogates and gives pleasure.

In William Villalongo's world of myth and allegory, images of Abstract paintings represent radical Modernisms while the "colonial gaze" is ever present. In the artist's hands, these paintings appear as masks sported by a clan of exotic brown women. In many works the viewer peers covertly through a velvety-silhouette onto "tribal" scenes in which various attributes of Abstract painting find usefulness as raw material in the hands of these matriarchs.

Paying tribute to the ornate stylings of the Late Baroque period, William Villalongo fills his canvas with frolicking maidens, nymphs and satyrs. Wooded glades, iridescent pools, and leafy bowers set the stage for what were traditionally fanciful idylls. Villalongo’s tales however take place not in the time of Louis XV’s Regence debauchery but in our own present day equivalent. Not simply a pretty picture, they tell a tale of lust and depravity, greed and envy. Watteau and Boucher gave us the gods and goddesses of the aristocracy, William Villalongo gives us Man.

William Villalongo is a revisionist. In painting, sculpture and cut paper, the artist lays bare our collective history, mythology, folklore, and religion for review and reprisal. Reordering this massive jumble, Villalongo assigns a voice and a presence to those marginalized or overlooked in the original telling. “Eden’s Remix” begins at the beginning as the story goes, as the first Man and Woman are cast from Paradise after eating the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.