Hector Villarroel

"Crossing"

In September 2000, I traveled to the high desert of Utah, where I began to paint a group of works I later titled Crossing. As my travels led me on to Tiburon and the San Francisco Bay Area for three months and to New York City for the winter, I continued to develop these works. By springtime I had returned to Brussels, Belgium, and gone on to Salamanca, Madrid, and Barcelona, Spain. I painted in each place, often beginning a work in one city and completing it in another. Finally I decided to conclude the voyage and opus in my homeland in Santiago, Chile during the summer (winter in the southern hemisphere.)

Crossing is the expression of a desire that the painting become a depository for wishes and hopes, and that the painting itself could take in and hold that which is out of reach. With each crossing from place to place, one is made aware of the transitory, and that is what is recorded in the painting. Through travel, one is encircled by so much information that the dialogue between exterior and interior, between place and displacement becomes deafening. In the end my subconscious is pierced, and the act of painting is the window through which I re-invent the metaphor.

Surrounded by an indifference and incompleteness that is so common these days, I strive to bring together something more, to bring life into each act. In the solitude of the studio, I explore mindscapes, the perfect decor for exploration where silence speaks with so many inaudible and abstract voices.

For each place I move, I try to decipher some "why" with an almost obsessive desire to recover that which has escaped through the many holes in memory. Painting, once again, is a persistent symbol of motion that speaks to me of travelogues and the need to record experience. The incessant crossing of bridges and more bridges, real and invisible, are like abhorrent waiting rooms that only offer signs of absence and make the need for refuge even more urgent. To paint is to re-create this refuge inside yourself where you are necessarily human and need nothing, save intuition.

Beginning in one place, Crossing gestates and moves on like a trail, leaving footprints scattered along the road. It is a circular voyage of permanent escapes reconstructed only by the fragile memory of gestures and passage, of our nomadic journey through this world.

Hector Villarroel
Translated from spanish by Christine E. Hatch

Harley Shaiken, Chair of the Center for Latin American Studies, welcomes artist Hector Villarroel.

The artist Hector Villarroel, Consul General of Chile, Fernado Varela and Christine Hatch.

Professor Stanley Brandes from the Department of Antropology, UC Berkeley talks with Teresa Stojkov, CLAS vice Chair.

Professor Lydia Chavez from the School of Journalism, UC Berkeley and Hector Villarroel.

Consul General, Fernando Varela and Teresa Stojkov, CLAS Vice Chair.

Hector Villarroel with Tom and Lois Ashley from Bank of America.

CLAS Visiting Scholars, Professors Enrique de la Garza y Marcela Hernandez with Hector Villarroel.