Problemas en el paraíso [Trouble in Paradise]: Andrea Villalón at Machete

A few days ago, while cleaning my computer, I found a folder containing photos and GIFs that were published in the now-defunct Rookie Magazine. Andrea and I appear in them, posing in different parts of her old apartment: a self-built concrete block on top of the house of her then-landlady in Colonia Navarte, where we would spend endless Thursday nights drinking and talking about art, music, and some piece of gossip or another. I don’t remember exactly how that routine came to be, but it took several months of our meeting there, or at the corner Sumesa to buy supplies—beer, limes, and popcorn—for us to continue with our girls’ night.

This is how a friendship took shape that, despite the kilometric distance separating us today, continues to course through me. In Andrea I found a simile with whom I shared and exchanged references and conversations that have accompanied me from my early to my late twenties.

Today it’s 2022 and we’re both 27 years old. We both were, or are, users of the Tumblr era; we witnessed the start of the Instagram era; we have continued to be fans of indie rock—even when it was announced as dead—and of bands like Blonde Redhead, Deerhunter, Warpaint, and Beach House. Of Sofia Coppola and Miranda July, Molly Soda, and Petra Cortright. Of Tavi Gevinson. Of the “indie sleaze” era that today is analyzed and theorized on TikTok as though enough years had already passed for it to be historicized.

During that same period, the medium in which the artist developed her work was analog photography, a technique that gained strength around 2015, when a nostalgia for the aesthetics of the 80s and 90s resurfaced. Through this medium, Andrea—who had recently moved from Uruapan—created an archive of images that portrayed her new life in Mexico City: her friends, her routes, her cats, but also her inner world, frequently represented by certain objects, situations, and self-portraits.

Thus began, through the constant appearance of this symbology, the consolidation of a visual language, one that was naturally integrated into her pictorial work when she leapt from photography to painting in 2018. In her work one continues to see mirrors and broken glass, cobwebs, vases with and without flowers, rings, pills, candles (which might be lit, dripping, or extinguished), notes with lists, phrases and dates, as well as Cesca-style chairs by Marcel Breuer, taken from her own dining room.

These inanimate objects come to life as symbols that translate the author’s feelings into a language of icons, so that such sorrows as the passing of time and the transience of life can be absorbed. Problemas en el paraíso [Trouble in Paradise] is not only a dive into Andrea’s mind, but also into the depth of my own or into that of whoever sees it.

The paintings show constructed scenarios in which layouts and their components are so strange that they seem to be suspended in time, as if the possibility of moving forward did not exist. From a page with a diary entry opened on a specific date, a cloudy landscape or a withered still life, the spaces are actions or moments that cannot be located in this world or in the world of ideas, an in-between place, a limbo.

Just as took place with the references that kept us close during those years, I now find in her painting a new opportunity to recognize and share a common state of mind, a product of the fear of growing up and of what it means to experience adulthood, throughout this journey that brings us ever upwards, to our thirties.

Verana Codina

Translated to English by Byron Davies