The Shedding 2025
The Shedding is a series of 8 paintings that emerged from a performative painting action Joaquín Villarino staged in 2024. The project began with a large-scale canvas divided into four chromatic zones, each corresponding to a life stage: blue for birth, yellow for childhood, purple for adolescence, and white for renewal and a new beginning.
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In the initial performance, Villarino threw paint onto a dancer, Marco Palomino, who moved across the prepared canvas. The action created a visual record of movement, spontaneity, and the tension between predetermined structure and improvisation. The chromatic divisions functioned as both temporal markers and emotional territories, mapping a biographical timeline through color and gesture.
"Following the performance, Villarino cut the large canvas into individual sections, transforming the single performative document into 8 autonomous paintings. He then worked into each fragment, developing the surfaces through layering. The resulting works range from 8ft x 5.5ft to 12ft x 6.4ft, executed in Mixed Media [Acrylic Painting, Oil Painting, Oil Pastel, Graphite, Charcoal].
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The series was created during a period of significant personal transition for Villarino, including the birth of his first child and his commitment to sobriety. Rather than functioning as purely autobiographical documents, the paintings use personal experience as a framework for examining broader themes of transformation, continuity, and the relationship between past and present selves. The performative action, documented through video and photographs, together with the resulting paintings, offer viewers multiple entry points into witnessing this process of cathartic transformation." - Delia Cabral
THE SHEDDING PHOTOGRAPHY 2025
In the initial performance, Villarino threw paint onto a dancer, Marco Palomino, who moved across the prepared canvas. The action created a visual record of movement, spontaneity, and the tension between predetermined structure and improvisation. The chromatic divisions functioned as both temporal markers and emotional territories, mapping a biographical timeline through color and gesture.
POLARITIES 2025
Polarities explores the dual forces that shape human existence. Light and darkness, chaos and order, masculine and feminine, life and death. Through gestural abstraction, Villarino examines the tension and harmony between opposing energies, revealing how they coexist and generate meaning through their interaction.
Working intuitively, Villarino builds each composition through layered applications of paint, allowing spontaneous gestures and textures to emerge. The work approaches contrast not as conflict but as complementary forces that create energy through their relationship.
INNER CHILD 2024
Inner Child confronts the difficult work of revisiting childhood wounds and the vulnerability required for healing. Working with gestural mark-making and bold color fields, Villarino maps the psychological terrain of early life, moments of wonder alongside experiences of pain, without resolution or sentimentality.
The vibrant palette and dynamic compositions reflect the ongoing process of transformation and self-discovery, acknowledging that
healing is not linear but cyclical. Each piece holds space for both the innocence and the hurt that shape who we become.
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