Echoes of a Journey: Stéphane Villafane, Dolby Chadwick Gallery
Stéphane Villafane 20.03.2024, 2024. Acrylic on canvas, 79 x 79 in
By art alone we are able to get outside ourselves, to know what another sees of this universe, which for him is not ours. ~ Marcel Proust
If art helps reveal realms beyond the fixed self, what do artists themselves do to break out of their own frames? Some artists find their flow through automatism, altered physical habits (e.g., using a non-dominant hand or working in darkness), or meditation. They may use constraint, chance, or surrender to materials to loosen intention and invite intuition. These strategies open a space where raw emotion, universal symbols, and spontaneous, uninhibited form can surface.
French artist Stéphane Villafane frequently goes “on the road” to shake loose habits and free up space for creation. Travel is a part of his method, a means of putting his imagination into motion. For Villafane, travel becomes a studio without walls.
It’s a Beatnik attitude, this treating travel as a perceptual reset. The point isn’t what one sees, but how perception alters when one is on the move. Landscapes blur, time stretches and collapses, and attention sharpens. When on a journey, Villafane is not collecting views to reproduce later; he’s tuning the sensorium, that place where sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch are received, interpreted, and integrated into conscious experience.
Stéphane Villafane 06.05.2025, 2025. Acrylic on canvas 80 x 68.75 in
The art that emerges on his large-scale canvases comes from this heightened state. It is as if the senses themselves are at play in an open field. Exuberant, euphoric, and dynamic, his paint traces, retraces, obscures, and uncovers its own steps in Villafane’s 06.05.2025. The piece is a provocation. Don’t just look at me; move with me. It’s pure bebop: fast tempo, intricate melody, and virtuosic improvisation.
In fact, all the paintings in Elsewhere, Villafane’s second solo exhibition at Dolby Chadwick, seem to project a soundtrack. I’d suggest Charlie Parker’s “Scrapple from the Apple” for 06.05.2025, but for the sublimely cool and spacious 30.04.2024, perhaps Miles Davis’s “Green in Blue”. I’ve just stepped away from my desk to my turntable because this resonance seemed too strong to resist. Even the images of these paintings on my screen seem to thrum and sway to Miles’s accompaniment. His modal notes conjure up a line from Beat poet Bob Kaufman: “Blues come dressed like introspective echoes of a journey.”
Stéphane Villafane 30.04.2024, 2024. Acrylic on canvas 79.75 x 69 in
What kind of journey? Where do these paintings take us? They give a sense of traveling across or within space. It could be the space of a single thought or sigh, or the ground that one covers in a lifetime of moving forward and falling back, learning and unlearning, desiring and letting go. They feel expansive and yet held. They are both stream-of-consciousness and comprehensively eloquent.
Stéphane Villafane 30.05.2024, 2024. Acrylic on canvas 80 x 66.25 in
Some capture long breathlines, others, such as 30.05.2024, 2024, seem to bloom towards a stillpoint. Painting 20.03.2024 presents the weaving of warp (thread under tension) and weft (looser thread) into a harmony of cool and warm notes. 28.02.2025 cascades, whereas 16.08.2023 floats dreamlike, an echo of what one once was or a shimmer of possibility.
Stéphane Villafane 28.02.2025, 2025. Acrylic on canvas 80 x 69 in
Each painting is titled with a date, written in the European style of day before month, followed by year. Each day has its own rhythm, its own tone, its own energy. One day is not more beautiful than the next. All are a part of us. They reflect internal weather and external stimuli. We surface ideas as quickly as we suppress them. We build and bury. We clarify and blur. We advance and retreat. But nothing is lost, and we are not lost. It’s all there on the canvas. Gorgeous, poetical, and alive.
Stéphane Villafane 16.08.2023, 2023. Acrylic on canvas31.75 x 24.25 in
Try this. If you’re lucky enough to see the exhibition in person, look at the paintings and ask yourself which one feels most like the sensations of you today. Stand in front of it or, if you’re looking at the images on a screen, stare at the one that best matches your internal mirror. My guess is that it will help you feel more seen. There you are. Amazing you!
The musicality of the paintings makes me resist using physical descriptors like landscape or abstract, and certainly figurative isn’t a word that I would even have considered. And yet, in swaying to the beat of 18.03.2025, I see her. The dancer – arms wide, eyes closed, fully inhabiting the moment, every cell in their body turned on.
Real as a dream
What shall I do with this great opportunity to fly?
~ Allen Ginsberg
Stéphane Villafane 18.03.2025, 2025. Acrylic on canvas 51 x 38.25 in
Stéphane Villafane, Elsewhere at Dolby Chadwick Gallery in San Francisco from February 5–28, 2026. Opening Reception: Thursday, February 5th, from 5:30–7:30 pm.
