Juan-Pablo Villegas
Umbra - Installation - 2018
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 20
Installation
We perceive colour in fragments that oscillate between darkness and light, in a process that gives form and coherence to our environment. The Umbra project studies the way we interpret the qualities of colour as a relationship that is mentally constructed and controlled by subjectivity. The segments of Umbra establish a framework of relations within which "the visible" takes up position on the basis of the elaboration of a construction/of a mental construction, interlacing the concrete and the abstract.
A/ FILTRE is a sculpture in which we observe chromatic variations and movements that are not perceptible without the use of registering technologies. To be appreciated, the viewers' cameras need to be used. The intention is to reflect on the mediation that takes place in the production of images; in this case, what we perceive in the exhibition space seems to direct our reading of the work, but it is through the documentation of the register that the aesthetic phenomenon is a accomplished.
B/ GAMME is a series of photographs in which colours are made on the basis of the three-colour principle. The mental impression of the colour tones and variants comes from the confusion and synthesis produced in perception; whereas the human eye receives the information from a large motif made of red, green and blue dots, the brain recomposes the units, and that is when colour appears. Gamme underscores the structure in which we articulate colour from language; it posits/establishes a questioning of realism through the artistic genre of landscape, and interrogates the mental determinants in the perception of colour.
C/ CLAIR-OBSCUR is a video that explores the absence of light and its appearance as colour when it is absorbed and reflected by matter. Images appear/occur in variants of opacity and their generative possibility occurs in the margins of the visible and the invisible. The sound part marks a parameter in the translation of colour into sound, by using the wavelength of each colour in relation to an audible scale.
Rather than consider the effects of tradition in the construction of the idea of colour, Umbra seeks to open up possible affects in the search for other subjectivities that re-elaborate "the possibility of making visible" reality.
Juan-Pablo Villegas
Juan-Pablo Villegas sees filmmaking as a way to bring together his interest in images and sound. It takes as a starting point the body’s perception of external stimuli and how that influences our personal and collective experience. The tools he uses derives from audiovisual principles that allow reflection by changing the way they are conventionally used. In recent years, he has researched issues related to translation and the expansion of the sensory spectrum, the animist condition of objects, and the formation of the psychosomatic.
