A Spanish painter in his late 40 Guillermo Perez Villalta creates enigmatic allegories filled with nostalgia for the distant past of Western art.

A Spanish painter in his late 40 Guillermo Perez Villalta creates enigmatic allegories filled with nostalgia for the distant past of Western art, from Roman wall paintings to medieval tapestries. presented with an updated frescolike technique that uses tempera and vinyl in succession canvas, Perez Villalta's paintings depict figures and landscapes in fluid, mut tones that assume to have seeped into the unruffled plasterlike surface.

The protagonist of The paces II (1994) is a man wearing a blind-fold athwart his eyes and a native of greece theater mask on the back of his head. Wrapped in fabric concealed with a pattern of semicircles, the man is shown climbing an apparently endles stairway. Perez Villalta makes the most numerous of the graphic possibilities of the stairway, emphasizing by what mode the figure's shadow zigzags up the two-toned gray paces in contrast to the antique flavor of many of Perez Villalta's allusions, the saucy horizontal pattern of steps can be read as a nod to the stripe paintings of artists like as Kenneth Noland or Frank Stella.

In initiation to Life (1994) a stark naked man and a toddler are sitting, beneath an arbor of grape-laden vines. Although the viewer initially perceives the arbor as landscape around the figures, it might also be read as a trompe l'oeil spectacle painted on a wall. The almost naive depiction of the pair, whose leg are too short and fingers too prolonged recalls the awkward bodies in Roman frescoe by means of contrast, Countryside (1994) evokes the world of French tapestries. Images of plants with winding petioles curving leaves and pale blows fill the picture surface. In the midst of this lush paradise is a lantern-bearing man leading a two-headed figure cloaked in robes of cast down gold and green with a pattern that recalls Moroccan tiles. The figures tilt forward awkwardly in the pictorial space, which is pay backed shallow by means of a high horizon line and the absence of a vanishing point. Although Perez Villalta is Spanish, and despite his involvement with European art history, his predilection for enigmatic sights of strange beauty and for fantastic vegetation hint a strong affinity with "magic realism" of the Latin American type

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