Santiago Reyes Villaveces – Reside

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Curatorial note by Eugenio Viola

Wednesday April 20 2016, at 6pm, Galleria MLF | Marie-Laure Fleisch presents Reside, a site-specific project by Santiago Reyes Villaveces to inaugurate the new Brussels exhibition space, an addition to the venue in Rome.

Besides its complex polysemy linked to its figurative use, the verb to reside (from the Latin residēre), also indicates the legal and administrative choice of a particular residence in a specific site; or more generally, it denotes the choice of a a fixed abode, or a place where one sojourns for a more or less stable period. This last meaning of the verb to reside best expresses the modus operandi used by Santiago Reyes Villaveces to create this exhibition; both his sojourn in the Belgian capital and the specificity of the exhibition space determine the conceptual and planning parameters of the work.
Reyes Villaveces's creative research is based on the Brazilian Neo-Concretism tradition and the Tropicália Movement, in specific the works of Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, and the Fragmentist poetics much loved by Jorge Luis Borges. From the former, he derives a sense of transitivity and precariousness of the work. From the latter, a concept of the fragment as a representation of an aesthetics of ruins interpreted in a non-romantic sense; a metaphor of something already born as a ruin, that has never really existed in its entirety.
Sculpture is Reyes Villaveces's preferred medium through which he explores its various possibilities by analysing different categories and physical structures of materials. His work tends towards a reciprocal system, in which the relation between materials, their form and collocation in space are destitute from any hierarchical organisation. Its plastic vocabulary creates a minimalist language, expressed through what the Colombian artist defines as an “immanent/silent architectural sensibility”, traced in the precarious structures that form the daily routine of the cities that he analyses: Bogotá first and foremost, and in this specific case, Brussels. Read more

Santiago Reyes Villaveces (1986, Bogotá) lives and works in London. In 2015 he won the Abraaj Royal College of Art Innovation Scholarship 2015/2017 and is currently following an MA in
Sculpture at the Royal College of Art in London (2015/2017). In 2014 he was artist in residence at Cittadellarte, Pistoletto Foundation, Biella, Italy.
His works and projects have been presented in public and private spaces in South and North America and Europe, among the others: SPACE, Irvine, California, 2016; Instituto de Visión Gallery, Bogotá, Colombia, 2015; Museo de Arquitectura Leopoldo Rother, Bogotá, Colombia, 2014; Cavallerizza Reale in Turin, Italy, 2014; Museum of Banco de la República, Bogotá, Colombia, 2013; Pinacoteca de Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brasil, 2009