Emilio Villalba: Paintings from Home

Dolby Chadwick Gallery presents Paintings from Home, an exhibition of recent work by artist Emilio Villalba.

"I can only paint what I truly know, what I see myself reflected in," says Villalba. From intimate portraits of his wife, Michelle, and his closest friends, to amalgamations of objects that could be found in his kitchen, his studio, the market, or the street, the artist builds scenes from his life by way of his unique visual language. He renders deeply personal affects—both on and off the canvas—in everything that surrounds him. Every known corner of San Francisco, the place he's called home for more than 15 years, could be his muse.

This exhibition follows Villalba's debut solo institutional presentation, Everything is Something at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas. Presented as a survey of his artistic evolution, and a homecoming of sorts, each composition featured in the show bursts with life and individuality. The maximalist aesthetic on the canvases, particularly in his Everything is Something series, speaks to his remarkable ability to capture the essence of everyday life. Strange, tumultuous, profound, and beautiful—all at once. Perhaps this is why these paintings resonate so strongly with viewers.

"Flattened digital images of his paintings convey only a fraction of the truth," writes the esteemed JoAnne Northrup, Executive Director and Chief Curator at the Nerman Museum, in her foreword to the institution's exhibition catalogue. "In person, his paintings are alive with busy brushwork, thick impasto, and a vibrant palette. His paintings convey a reverence for everyday objects and the people in his life."

The artist weaves loose stylistic influences from the Bay Area Figurative Movement (David Park, Joan Brown) and Expressionism (from Edvard Munch, to Max Beckmann and Chaim Soutine), and continues to experiment with Abstraction (inspired by artists Gerhard Richter, Piet Mondrian, and Stanley Whitney). As his canvases become even thicker, Villalba blurs the line between painting and sculpture in his recent compositions—pushing the boundaries of his training as a figurative painter. The large-scale works are characterized by their grid-like, sculptural quality achieved by his distinct painting method: systematically building numerous layers of oil paint onto the surface. Everything is Something 20, for example, displays intense emotions embodied by a controlled chaos in the composition. As Northrup puts it, "this is still life painting taken to an exuberant extreme and [it] is both personal and universal."

Villalba is his most honest and vulnerable in this body of work. With careful observation, each painting—or, rather, scene from his everyday life—imbues a strong, almost familiar, sense of intimacy and belonging for the viewer. It is the artist's world on the canvas, yes, but one can't help but live in it. The thick layers of bright, glossy oil paint in his compositions transform mundane subjects to extraordinary narratives. "The evident buildup on the surface mirrors how the human form reveals its deeper structural elements," states Villalba, "bones and anatomy beneath the skin."

Emilio Villalba (b. 1984) received a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from the Academy of Art University, San Francisco in 2012 and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Animation from the Art Institute of California, Santa Ana in 2006. He has exhibited extensively in San Francisco and New York City, and has collaborated with the international fashion house Valentino. His work was recently acquired by the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas.