"L'EAU ROUGIE DE LA VEINE MÉMOIRE" - 16 Rue des Quatre Fils, Paris

For his fourth exhibition at the RX&SLAG gallery, Julio Villani, a Franco-Brazilian artist born in 1956, will be presenting a previously unseen group of some fifteen paintings and large papers mounted on canvas. Villani's work reflects two of his obsessions: the importance of nature - apparent in his earliest works from the 1970s - and his attachment to language and words. These are under attack in a world where the rhetoric of the ‘tooth pullers’ is particularly loud, misleading and toxic. In response, he creates works in which charcoal lines unite fragmented spaces and arrange forms in balance.

L'O de l'eau
Everything starts with water. The water evoked in a poem by Henri Michaux* that Julio Villani has chosen as the title of the exhibition - a text that, for him, has a very contemporary resonance - but also the water that constitutes the Indian ink, the acrylic and the different states of transparency of his painting, more or less fluid. ‘The same water carries the memory of the world, constitutes us - and reveals my compositions’, he explains. And then there's the O, a closed line and letter of the alphabet, displayed on the canvases and on the papier-mâché alongside the A, H and I, broken letters in pieces. "At a time when words no longer seem to mean anything - when the pullers of teeth and souls are at the helm - what can a painter do but plunge into the reddened water of this vain, vein of memory?

Divide to reunite
Pure colour, straight from the tube, diluted in water, hugs the contours of geometric shapes, stopped by ridges drawn in charcoal - a primitive, ancestral material derived from burning a piece of wood. These lines segment the canvas, defining trees, writing and light architecture made up of modules. Sometimes the first gesture is the right one, but Julio Villani may repeat it several times to find the right balance. So he erases, rubs out, starts again, once, twice, twenty times, without trying to hide the charcoal mark. The canvas treasures these ghostly traces that are part of the history - the memory - of the painting. 
These lines are also those that draw borders on a canvas, or erase them by bringing several together - the works are often composed of two or three canvases joined together. "This division helps me to structure the drawing that comes next. The idea of a separation giving way to a union is also important because it represents me: there are two countries in me that coexist. Connecting what is scattered is intrinsic to those who live here and there.

And then there are Julio Villani's titles, which are a gateway to poetry and an opportunity to emphasise his love of words, their rhythm, their sound, their meaning, their mischievous diversion: Lettres brisées, Poésie de l'infime, Foi persistante, La vérité se cacha en la pleine clarté, Le dessin comme pratique du débordement, Estompage des souvenirs, Les rois images, Imparable jeu de sens, Écoute mon silence...
" Poetry is a flexible way of looking at the world. You can do anything with words... as long as you respect and cherish them". A parallel narrative gradually emerges from this interplay of colours and words, traces and strokes, reflecting other facets of Julio Villani's inexhaustible work.

* Henri Michaux, extract from Portrait des Meidosems, in ‘La Vie dans les plis’, 1949
"Streams of affection, of infection, streams of the backbone of suffering, bitter caramel of yesteryear, stalagmites slowly formed, it is with these streams that he walks, with them that he apprehends, spongy limbs from the head, pierced by a thousand little transverse flows, reaching down to the ground, extravasated, like blood bursting the arterioles, but it's not blood, it's the blood of memories, of the piercing of the soul, of the fragile central chamber, struggling in the oakum, it's the reddened water of the vein of memory, flowing without design, but not without reason in its small guts that leak everywhere; tiny and multiple punctures. "