Viscontino
Painting, drawing, and ceramics. London, UK; Bogotá, Colombia; Madrid, Spain. 2010–present.
For over a decade, Felipe Martínez-Villalba has been compulsively painting a series of figures he now calls “Viscontinos.” They first appeared in his sketchbooks during his time at Central Saint Martins in 2010, as portraits of imaginary beings that seemed to emerge without conscious explanation. Over time, these figures began to take over canvases, becoming the central axis of a personal language and an intimate, obsessive, deeply spiritual artistic practice.
Initially they may have arisen as a way to occupy his installations—an urge to inhabit a time and place. For years, Felipe generated these characters impulsively without understanding their origin or future. However, a recent revelation radically transformed his relationship with them: a family member revealed a silenced generational story—an indigenous collective suicide among his ancestors in Santander, Colombia, possibly motivated by social judgement. This suppressed history gave new meaning to the Viscontinos. They were no longer merely enigmatic presences, but pictorial portals to an ancestral memory and a denied, fragmented truth, finally finding a way to be spoken and recognized through the artist.
In that context, Felipe’s work becomes an energetic process to say what has not been said: during painting he acts as a medium between dimensions. “I do not know who they are, but I know I must make them exist,” he affirms. The first intuitive, decisive stroke opens a portal; from there, colour becomes figure and form, composition emerges effortlessly, and the canvases are invaded by these primal beings surrounded by auras and organic spheres evoking origin, birth, and nature. The creation of each Viscontino involves intense physical and emotional exertion—a full surrender. But it also represents a form of silent repair.
Felipe works with a palette of vivid, saturated, almost electric colours that engage in constant dialogue through contrasts and complementary harmonies: intense oranges against acidic greens, electric blues on red backgrounds, magentas that vibrate alongside dense yellows. This chromatic repetition generates internal coherence in the project, creating an authentic pictoric language.
At first glance, the Viscontinos may appear as dreamlike or archetypal otherworldly figures. However, they refer to symbolic portraits of what was unsaid, what could not exist. They hold familial and collective history. They are beings without gender, without age, without hair, without clothing—stripped of anything that might place them in time or fix identity. Their constant appearance in Felipe’s work reveals a vital need: to grant them space, voice, and presence—not as decoration, but as legitimate inhabitants of a pictorial universe that calls them, finding a place on this earthly moment they once inhabited.
Today, the Viscontinos begin to inhabit more defined settings. Felipe constructs spaces for them that allow them to tell their story, generating a memory narrative from past to present. They are no longer suspended in the void: they exist, act, and are seen. This shift marks the closure of a cycle of over 15 years and the beginning of a new stage in his practice, where the symbolic weight of blood, lineage, and family truth becomes visible.
