Welcome to Willa + Art Objects to The Absentee Owner

Hello. First of all, I would like to thank the lovely gestures of Japanese people since I got back to Tokyo, I was really not expecting anything. I especially want to thank Magic Room Gallery for giving me the chance to show my work and this new party. Why do I do art? It's a matter of health, happiness and self-awareness, the creative process serves me as a therapy against my desillusion with the real world, only creating my own universe is that I find relief and can stretch my wings.

Parties for me have always been a means to create my community of friends, people who shares a similar moral. I am not here to show-off my clothes, I am doing this so that we all can share a romanticist moment, it does not depend on me exclusively, if sometimes I can not help but feel the party was a failure, I wash my hands of this: it's not for me to expect ignorance, coldness and mere poses from the people who comes.

Why do I have the need to meet strangers, then? In general, I think I am a coquettish person, or with a bacchanalia tendency, I want to faire l'amour a mourir.

Welcome to Willa. Let's meet, let's converse, we might end up as real lovers or not, but it's beautiful to build something from love, non?

I leave you with some thirds' art objects that make me think about "The Absentee Owner", my thema and photos for the party release the next 16th of january, 2010!


Chabuca Granda's song “El Dueno Ausente”(1970's), which means The Absentee Owner in Spanish. It is about a domestic servant from the Andes in Peru, she works at Chabuca's house in the capital Lima, she came to Lima to look for her absentee owner that is fighting in the war. She can't find him. Chabuca thinks the maid is losing her beauty working so far away from her land, the beautiful peruvian Andes, and asks her to go back there to wait for her owner as soon as possible.



The film "Broken English" by Zoe Cassavetes, 2007. What does a regular single woman in her mid 30's feel like? Loneliness, desperation? At last she finds an owner who shows her that actually she should be self-possessed! The soundtrack is so recommended. I will play some tracks in Willa.



The aria "Sola, Perduta, Abbandonata" in the opera "Manon Lescaut" by Giacomo Puccini, 1893. Des Grieux has gone to look for water, leaving Manon "alone, lost, and abbandoned," as she sings that she does not want to die. Poster by Rafal Olbinski.




The films by Wong Kar Wai are a cornucopia of characters suffering of loveless and void. My favorite ones are "2046"'s Faye Wong from 2004(the pacient creature waiting for her japanese boyfriend, in her both roles, human and android, killed me!). And "Days Of Being Wild"'s Leslie Cheung from 1990 (in his case, his owner is his prostitute mother who abandoned him when baby).



The photography of Nan Goldin will always be an influence. Visually, I enjoy watching her muses' expressions of emptyness after having sex. Why...?



The film "L'homme Blessé" by Patrice Chereau, 1983. My favorite homosexual tragedy so far, a boy falls maddly inlove with a thief that kisses him fiercely in a public toilet. From then on, he can not live anymore without thinking in the weird criminal, 'til death do them appart...



This photography titled "Nude", London, 1956 by Bill Brandt.



Henrietta Rae's painting "Psyche Before The Throne Of Venus", 1894. Psyche can't bear her grief and implores to Venus the address of her lover, Venus' son, Amour aka Cupid.



Nicolas Poussin's "Echo and Narcissus", 1627/28. Somehow he looks devastated and empty in this depiction, but actually, he is perfect, he must be just tired of the chatterbox Echo. The putti, on the other hand, is an art object chilling out.



"Die Bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant", 1972 (aka The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant) by Fassbinder. The twice-divorced diva Petra is tired of playing the tricks of love, she seems to be in her most lucid phase (her speech is messianic for me), until the muse Karin comes into her life, causing an emotional turn and a sad yet ambiguous ending in Petra, between the most obscure light and the most dazzling darkness. The lover's hardscrabble life...



The novel "Notturno Indiano" by Antonio Tabucchi, 1984. A journey in the search of a lost friend in surreal India is an excuse to represent the self-search of the narrator. But what if automatism, shadows,absence and emptyness is all he can discover in the chaotic India after all?



My favorite supermodel Snejana Onopka, with her little sad eyes, as though she already had knew, since before her birth, how empty life can be.. Photo by Steven Meisel.



Sarah Moon's Pirelli Calendar 1972. What can be more "realm of emptyness" than an entire year of beautiful prostitutes without clients?



This painting "Alenushka" by Viktor Vasnetsov, 1881. It discovered it in the cover of one my favorite books, Netochka Nezvanova by Fyodor Dostoievski.



"Ren xiao yao" by Jia Zhangke, 2002 (aka Unknown Pleasures). The story of Chinese teenagers on the verge of globalization, their daily life in the distopic province, with the sempiternal feeling of emptyness and no future, but the simple pleasures of singing pop songs and coupling. Adored it. I think this film is a subtle attack to their still unknown pleasures that's making them suffer: the arrival of the new capitalistic lifestyle in China, the consumerist society. Unconsciously, capitalism is on its way to posses their heart. And they will suffer for ever. (How many of us are owned by capitalism, by the way? Not me.).