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Bullet y Trajectory, 2000

Mixed media installation

Carlos Rivera Villafañe’s work depicts and interrogates contemporary attitudes toward violence. Through his paintings, prints, sculptures, and installations, Rivera Villafañe’s work takes anger and hostility–and the weapons that give shape to these overflowing frustrations–as its topic. His art responds to the fetishization of armaments which is portrayed unquestioningly in the mass media, and the extent to which society has normalized violence.

Bullet y Trajectory is the sixth and most elaborate installation that Rivera Villafañe has created. The work is a "stage set," originally constructed on a property in the country outside San Juan. Rivera Villafañe asked several artists to help him decorate the room by contributing paintings for the walls. With several invited participants, including artists and male adolescents from a local housing project, he shot at it sixty times with various guns, documenting the process of destruction through photographs and video. Later, in his studio, Rivera reassembled the work, painstakingly recreating each gunshot's trajectory with an aluminum dowel that traces the bullet’s path. The final installation includes the set, riddled by bullets, a bristle of eight-foot-long dowels that protrude from both the front and back of the set, marking each trajectory, photo-documentation of the shooting, and a video of the process, which has been distorted and slowed. The video and photographs, which document and explicate the artists’ method, also compound the experience. While the photographs reveal the step-by-step facts of the process, the video only conveys the atmosphere–a horrific and monstrous din.

All of Rivera Villafañe’s work employs an urban youth aesthetic, bright colors and loaded textures expressive of popular street culture. His is a world punctuated by idiomatic and vulgar phrases, tacky fabrics, and plastic objects. By bringing these qualities into the museum, his work can be seen as a forced encounter with cultural- and class-based values. Rivera Villafañe’s piece presents an utterly haphazard, drive-by moment of entirely senseless, catastrophic violence.

–DC

Carlos Rivera Villafañe (b. Ponce, Puerto Rico, 1968) holds a Bachelors’ of Fine Art from Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico (San Juan).

His major recent solo exhibitions include Bullet y Trajectory II, ARCO ‘01 (Madrid, España, 2001), Bullet y Trajectory, showcased in the week-long arts festival, PR '00: Parentesis en la Ciudad, (San Juan, Puerto Rico, 2000); and Full Metal Jacket, Museo del Arsenal de la Puntilla, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueño (San Juan, Puerto Rico,1996).

Notable recent group exhibitions include II Bienal Iberoamericana de Lima (Lima, Perú, 1999), Trás la Pérdida de las colonias, exposición itinerante——Filipinas, San Juan, Cuba, España (organizada por el Consorcio de Museos de la Comunidad Valenciana, Spain, 1999), Sexta Bienal Internacional de Pintura de Cuenca (Cuenca, Ecuador, 1998), and XII Bienal Internacional de Gráfica Ljubljana (Slovenia, Yugoslavia, 1997).