Fulguraciones

To enter here is to return to an experience prior to language. In fulguraciones, Valeria Villegas's first solo exhibition, the artist constructs a space conceived as an inhabitable body: a soft, enveloping architecture. The show begins from the image of the womb as a way of thinking through an interior space: a cavity associated both with shelter and with a process of transformation. As the project developed, however, the pieces began to detach from that initial reference and acquired a formal autonomy of their own. The installation thus shifts toward more ambiguous territory, where cosmic, drive-driven, and nocturnal imaginaries appear. The exhibition explores dark tonalities and absorbent surfaces that turn the pictorial space into a suspended atmosphere, marked by a certain perceptual instability. The variations of grays and blacks, together with the expanded scale of the canvases, generate an environment that alters spatial orientation and places the visitor in a tension between closeness and estrangement, between shelter and abyss. Villegas understands painting as a spatial device and bodily experience before it is merely a surface of representation. The pictorial gesture unfolds at an architectural scale, transforming the visitor's path into a sensory experience in which our body becomes inscribed within the material field of the work. The process of making is also deeply physical. Each piece involves a direct relationship with the paint through the use of hands, feet, and the full weight of the body. The canvases retain traces of that interaction and make visible a gestural energy in which the body does not appear represented but inscribed in the very matter. The installation does not propose a closed image or a single reading; rather, it invites one to remain within something that still seems to be taking shape. Amid shadows, pauses, and varying densities, painting ceases to function as surface and becomes threshold: a place where the body momentarily loses its limits and comes into contact with a series of fulgurations. Valeria Villegas (Guadalajara, 1992) holds a degree in Psicología from ITESO and has furthered her training in Artes Visuales at institutions such as Emily Carr University of Art and Design (Canada), Accademia D'Arte Firenze (Italy), and Beaux-Arts de Paris (France). She was a recipient of the program Jóvenes Creadores of the Sistema de Apoyos a la Creación y Proyectos Culturales (2023–24), presenting her work at the Complejo Cultural Los Pinos. She lives and works in Guadalajara. This exhibition was carried out with the support of the Patronato de Arte Contemporáneo (PAC), through its 2025 Call for Curatorial Projects.