Notes

Using the same vocabulary of materials and colouration as his San Sebastiano and War Machine, executed a year prior in 1986, Rhythmic Forms sees Villa departing from the rigidity of his previous sculptures, in search of a more organic expression.

As Amalie von Maltitz and Karel Nel note, his “powerful organic shapes take on a life of their own, contrasting markedly with the mechanistic harshness of the preceding, much more planer works. Villa appears to revel in an almost Baroque feast of varied, bold, twisting, stretching, expanding, massive open shapes. Growing from a single stem, the explosion of rampant forms sometimes stretch to over three meters in height, challenging space. References to the human, animal and plant kingdoms merge to form a life-field with mutating potential, so different from the utterly immutable quality of the works that evoke the machines of war and aggression. These new works somehow seem to affirm life itself and its spontaneous ability to grow and transform in unexpected ways”.¹

Whilst the work of the early 1980s came as a response to the oppressive ideology of the apartheid state, these humanistic concerns are evident in Villa’s early work. Writing in the 1965 catalogue of his solo exhibition at the Pretoria Art Museum, curator AJ Werth notes that Villa’s work “at present absorbed a number of elements from the physical surroundings, this Africa, in which the sculptor works: this Africa of startling contrasts, of thorny plants, with the brooding memory of its prehistoric past and its awareness of a harsh yet poetic reality.

Villa creates his steel sculptures in a bold reaching out into space, starting from complex yet beautifully organised planes and masses which gradually evolve, projecting outwards, evolving into finely shaped spiky points which are like the antennae of a creature he has created… In some ways Villa’s sculptures are drawings in space, using space and buildings with it. The plastic qualities of metal are re-discovered by him. This hard and seeming unwieldy material has been mastered by the artist as he uses it to fashion masses, or to suggest them by planes and perforated forms of infinitive variety.

His work grows naturally as a dialogue between natural forms and the artistic selection and reshaping of these forms in accordance with the artist’s purpose and plan. In this process of growth the material with which he works plays its natural part, neither dominating the subject nor being subjected to it, or thereby losing its peculiar identity.

Each “being” that he creates is a living entity, and there is a heart which beats inside everyone of these metal creatures. Quite often there can be found in these “gentle monsters”, as they have been called, something humorous, even a certain element which evokes within us a response of something akin to love. It is as if these creatures of steel, heavily armoured for the battle of life are yet rather defenseless, and are putting out gentle fingers, seeking the warmth of human contact. Thus the aggressive quality and inner tension of these metal sculptures are tempered by a touch of playfulness and love”.² 

1. Maltitz and Nel. (2005). Villa at 90. Johannesburg and Cape Town, Jonathan Ball. Page 92.
2. AJ Werth. Edoardo Villa. Arcadia, Pretoria Art Museum, 7  to 24 October, 1965. Catalogue introduction.