Jerónimo Villa was born in Bogota, Colombia, in 1990. His artistic education was a musician, and his interest in the visual arts comes from his parents: his father is a sculptor, and his mother is a fashion designer. His early works were paper sculptures. However, in 2009 he began to work systematically and made pieces with wire. Part of his work is focused on using found objects that could be window fragments, which he incorporates from 2020.

He began with the type of work he currently does through carpentry, making stretchers, frames, and other structures. It was working with wood that he discovered sandpaper, and it transformed from an instrument to an indispensable material. He was intrigued by the fortuitous designs that appeared on the used sandpaper and used them first in collages. After that came the transition between the used sandpaper used to treat wood and the new ones he would use on his pieces. The artist sees this process as life and death, wood as a life allegory, and the sandpaper as its executioner who is finishing it slowly. The original transmuting vehicle to wood is the sandpaper, the initial matter, establishing a dialogue between them. Here he is alluding to the material functionality and time as a conditioning factor.

His work uses all wood variants, from whole parts to sawdust. Conceptually he is close to Buddhism through impermanency, the inherent and constant transformation of change, and accepting that nothing is static.

He takes advantage of the material’s visual characteristics, like in the sandpaper’s case, and searches for different colors and textures to create a “landscape” with dissimilar material gradations. By tearing the sandpaper, he exposes the base color, creating dynamism and dimensionality. That’s how these “landscapes” emerge, which imitate the water movement as peaks or create mountains through the superimposition of several layers of sandpaper. By layering the sandpaper, it establishes an accumulation that talks about volume but also about what is hidden from the naked eye.

Another series includes matches, in which he takes off the heads and places them over sandpaper, creating different compositions. Here he develops a similar dynamic to the wood-sandpaper because the sandpaper becomes the transformative element once more.

This artist looks to the materials beyond their intrinsic value, searching for their expressive capabilities. That’s how he finds parallels between certain types of sandpaper used for metals and leather. He creates pieces in which the visual similarities of these two are explored in works that look similar to stitched leather. He uses matches to “sew” sandpaper fragments, which keep in place the sandpaper fragments, similar to a quilt from afar. Here he is working with concepts such as impossibility, fragility, and impermanence challenging all the material’s possibilities. The contact points with textiles allowed him to participate in exhibitions of that nature.

Villa began his residency with D+C Foundation on February 13 and will be at the studio residence for twelve weeks, during which he expects to create a body of works based on two of his series: Turmalina and Aparatos Abrasivos (Tourmaline and Abrasive Apparatus). The second is a tribute to the Colombian sculptor Edgar Negret (1920-2012).

He has exhibited regularly since 2011, and his work has been included in many collective exhibitions in Colombia, the United States, Uruguay, Russia, and Venezuela. In addition, his pieces are in private collections worldwide and institutions such as the Tolima Art Museum in Colombia.