Sitting Gioconda. Homenaje a Lucio Fontana (Sitting Gioconda. Homage to Lucio Fontana)

Darío Villalba has said that his work comes from a dialogue with Pop Art and subsequently with Conceptual Art. Villalba reflects on the human being within the context of mass society, accentuating the analysis of existential and sociopolitical themes. His use of photography as painting is pioneering: he does not use photographic images as something cold and distant but rather as a way to transcribe the impulses of human beings. For this purpose, he manipulates the photograph pictorially, while applying composition and decomposition procedures on the image, the effect of which is to show, conceal and fragment reality. The human figure, the faces of society’s outcasts, are the protagonists of his work, which is highly symbolic and contains explicit references to pain and death. His production, which includes objects, capsules, installations, sculptures and documents, is characterised, as a whole, by a process of self-analysis, increasing formal complexity, and the integration of figuration and abstraction. In Sitting Gioconda. Homenaje a Lucio Fontana (Sitting Gioconda. Homage to Lucio Fontana), a photograph of an unidentified woman is associated with the celebrated work by Leonardo da Vinci. Facing the viewer, she peeks out through a gap in a veil, in the style of Lucio Fontana, who had died in 1968, one year before this piece was made.