Over a decade after his passing, Lying + Flying at Silverlens Manila marks Carlos Villa’s first dedicated exhibition in his ancestral homeland, the Philippines.

Carlos Villa’s work sprang from his experience as a second-generation Filipino-American in multicultural San Francisco, a position that shaped both his art and his politics. That background is inseparable from his impact on American art history, where he influenced generations as an educator, creator, and activist.

Lying + Flying is anchored by a group of 1980s-era body prints on large, unstretched canvases, paintings that make the artist’s body both subject and instrument. Villa inked his naked form and pressed it onto fabric: face, hands, limbs, torsos. The gesture is direct, even blunt. A brown body marks space, refusing erasure. Years after his death, Villa still stands in the room.

But Villa’s crisp body prints were just one layer of his lived-in approach. He played from both hands, drawing fluidly and nonhierarchically across ethnographies and the avant-garde. He assembled materials, philosophies, and relationships into a collage that reflected his own life of plurality. He held ritual, humor, art, politics, and material culture together like an unruly household that somehow still worked.

The pieces in Lying + Flying, like the artist’s larger practice, masquerade as messy, but this is only a cartomancer’s bluff. Wait a moment and an architecture emerges, a cunning grid that ripples rather than locks into place. Villa understood composition as an organism that is both organic and organized. His art asks where mark making slips into performance slips into ritual, and why these semantic boundaries, and boundaries themselves, even matter at all.

Words by Katey Acquaro

Carlos Villa (b. 1936 - d. 2013, San Francisco, USA) was a San Francisco-born visual artist, grass-roots activist, curator, author, and educator for over 40 years at the San Francisco Art Institute, among other Bay Area institutions

In 2022, Villa received the first-ever major museum retrospective dedicated to the work of a Filipino American artist, which toured from the Newark Museum of Art to the San Francisco Art Institute and Asian Art Museum. Villa’s works were also included in the 2011 solo retrospective Manongs, Some Doors and a Bouquet of Crates at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, and Other Sources: An American Essay, a multidisciplinary, multiethnic exhibition centered around women and artists of color, curated by Villa and presented in conjunction with the 1976 American Bicentennial.