Martín Villalonga was born in 1950 in San Isidro, Province of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thanks to the guidance and tutoring of his grandfather, the renowned architect Raúl Villalonga, he had the privilege of becoming aware of his artistic vocation from a very young age. He studied at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano and later, in 1969, he traveled to Mendoza to study with the master engraver Víctor Delhez. Since then, he has participated in multiple collective and individual exhibitions and art salons at a national and international level. He lives in the city of Mendoza until today.

The visual language of Martín Villalonga is part of the lyrical abstraction. Lyrical abstraction is a pictorial trend in which objects from the world around us are not referenced, nor is the objective representation of reality pursued; it is fundamental the expression of the immediate and individual emotion of the artist. It is very important then, the gesture and creative freedom; In this sense, it is common for artistic action to use and combine techniques such as dripping, frottage, and grattage, which print textures, generate reliefs, contrasts, and expand the pictorial and expressive voluptuousness of the artwork.

Villalonga has a particularly cold color palette, dominated by black and white, grayscale and blues, with occasional hints of bright colors. Among the pictorial solutions we notice brushstrokes, large amounts of paint, manipulated in different ways, forming conglomerates and sinuosities, displacements, arranging lines, curves, facets, layers, transparencies, articulating poetic compositions. Materiality is revealed to us by communicating his particular worldview. As Andrés Cáceres comments, when contemplating the work of this artist “we have witnessed the infinite display of that sensibility of Villalonga, that drunkenness of pictorial beauty that he gives us and, at the same time, the investigation that he makes, more and more, of the matter itself as if it were his own soul”.

Ana Beatriz García