Installation view, Courtesy of Esso Gallery.
'“After the Storm,” a wall painting by William Villalongo, combines discreet figural elements with an episodic panorama. Filigreed black velvet and gold leaf shapes, severed fingers, tree branches, hearts, and eyeballs float in a fragmentary oceanscape, coalescing into damaged quasi-organisms. This gleeful Frankensteinianism is elaborated in a small wall-mounted sculpture of a mutant horse-lady standing in a field of tiny plastic flowers and carrying severed heads on chains. Additional appendages sprout from her back: praying hands, a boar’s head, a black nun, a white monk. Villalongo often masks violent elements in his work, like the bleeding, fist-sprouting Picasso-esque head in “His Eye Is on the Sparrow,” with a bright palette and easy-on-the-eyes materials. The visual pleasure offered to the viewer quickly turns into unrest, and vice versa. The flexibility of Villalongo’s practice shows an artist willing to try any number of possibilities, both new and deeply rooted in tradition, to represent an increasingly bizarre world.'
- Roger White