John Ivan Villalba
John Ivan Villalba approaches abstract painting as a physical practice. Working primarily with acrylic on canvas, he uses movement, water, gravity, and the force of the body to produce energetic compositions that merge action expressionism with his long experience in athletics. Sports and performance recur in the work, not as separate subjects but as extensions of the way it is made.
Villalba grew up in a home where art history, classical music, and contemporary music were part of everyday conversation. His mother, whom he describes as a self-educated historian and 1960s flower child, encouraged an early familiarity with art. In elementary school, he was regularly pulled from class to make papier-mâché projects for hallway displays, including works celebrating the sun, moon, and seasons.
Art classes through school and college established drawing as an early strength, but Villalba eventually found the demands of representational drawing too restrictive. His athletic background led him toward abstract work with a more immediate, physical vocabulary. In the early 1990s, he moved from easel painting to working on canvas on the floor, using acrylic and water to keep the process continuous and responsive. Later experiments incorporated projected imagery and other nontraditional methods.
The artist does not work from a rigid formula. Each painting begins with a general mental direction, sometimes supported by a sketchbook reference, but the finished result can depart sharply from the original idea. “What is envisioned cognitively and what evolves or the result in the physical world is completely different,” he says. The uncertainty is part of the appeal. Once the paint begins to move, the work has to be met in real time.
Villalba compares the preparation for a painting to preparing for competition. A large blank canvas has the same anticipatory quality as the start of a game: the conditions are established, but the exact result is unknown. This relationship between athlete and artist became literal in a 2021 commission for Louisville City FC, a five-by-eight-foot painting that incorporated a goalkeeper dive and a full-body impression on canvas. The work brought physical sports performance directly into the painting’s structure.
Music can also direct the rhythm of a work. After believing he had completed the five-by-eighteen-foot painting Globalization Echte Welt 2020, Villalba remained dissatisfied. Listening to a live 1968 Jimi Hendrix performance gave him the energy to add gold, silver, and bronze streaks that brought the painting to completion. Such moments of revision are typical of a process he describes as a “wrestling match,” in which persistence determines whether a work reaches resolution.
Villalba’s wider aim is to merge art and athletics under sustainability. He describes his paintings as “athletic energy in motion frozen in time,” using explosive color to suggest fitness, dedication, performance, and sustained effort. His interest in thermodynamics also enters the imagery, particularly where paint appears to shift between gas, liquid, and solid states across the canvas.
The artist measures success through completing a project despite its challenges, rather than through reproducing an initial image exactly. He continues to develop a practice that depends on physical mobility, preparation, and openness to change, while encouraging other artists to make work within their means, find places where it can be useful, and continue producing regardless of rejection.
