by Mark Van Proyen

Remember that great line from Clement Greenberg’s 1943 review of Jackson Pollock’s first solo exhibition? “Pollock has gone through the influences of Miró, Picasso, Mexican painting and what not, and has come out painting with his own brush.” A similar observation can be made about Emillio Villalba’s exhibition of new paintings — save that Villalba’s work betrays a wider variety of paint application tools and much thicker paint than Pollock ever used. It also reveals a different roster of influences, ranging from David Park to Phillip Guston to Picasso to (early) Joan Brown, with a small dose of Francis Bacon-like anxiety added to the mix. 

Emilio Villalba | Artist and Model, 2024 | Oil on canvas | 30 x 24 inches

The important point is that Villalba’s paintings amalgamate those influences in ways that defy generic predictability, transmuting them into a unique approach to well established modernist subjects. Adjectives like “goofy” and “obstreperous” can be applied to some, while others seem to be comically self-deprecating. Despite all the humor, however, they somehow manage to intimate something resembling existential terror.

Emilio Villalba | Self-Portrait with Demons, 2025 | Oil on canvas | 40 x 30 inches

Did I mention that Villalba used very thick paint? It’s worth repeating that because impasto is the single most salient feature uniting the 21 works in this exhibition (all dated 2024 or 2025). The majority are small, single or double figure portraits, usually set in an indoor environment. The dominant theme is a familiar one, the artist in his studio, often featuring stout tubes of paint, well-used brushes, colorful paint palettes, coffee cups and open laptop screens. Faces rendered with paint this thick take on the quality of contorted tribal masks, while brilliantly colored backgrounds often look like slatherings of iridescent cake frosting. Sometimes, these surfaces are bisected and scored by deliberate stokes of contrasting color, as can be seen in the viridian grid set against the yellow tabletop in “Self-Portrait with Demons.”

Then there are the cigarettes. Some of these are painted thickly enough to look like small lengths of white garden hose. For example, in “Looking at My Face” a centrally positioned head is doubled by its mirrored reflection to the left in the unsettled composition. A large hand clutching a cigarette is exaggerated on the right foreground so as to resemble a still from an old-timey rotoscope animation. It is interesting to note that Villalba studied animation prior to getting his MFA in painting, a fact that might help explain the morphology of some of the forms inhabiting his work.

Emilio Villalba | Looking at My Face, 2025 | Oil on canvas | 30 x 24 inches

Despite the thickness of his paint and the evident array of tools used to apply it, Villalba is still able to devote some surprising attention to descriptive details. Tubes of oil paint scattered on floors or tabletops are specific and tangible. In fact, you can guess the brand of paint depicted in some of Villalba’s images, for example, the Holbein colors on the rust-colored floor of “Michelle in the Studio.”

“Paintings from Home” includes three larger works that stray from studio scenes to reveal more complex pictorial ambitions. They seem to simultaneously be urban scenes and cluttered still-life compositions moving in and out of focus, both buried and extracted from those layers of paint as if they were archeological treasures partially excavated from the tomb of daily life. “Everything is Something 16” depicts an array of contorted Mr. Potato Head faces intermixed with other table-top objects in a loosely gridded composition that evokes the work of Roy De Forest, Red Grooms, and Chaim Soutine. As with the other works, the paint here is thick, sumptuous and applied with a charming recklessness, filling the gallery with the aroma of off-gassing oil paint slowly finalizing its drying process.

Emilio Villalba | Everything is Something 16, 2024 | Oil on canvas | 48 x 36 inches