Patricio Villanueva
Patricio Villanueva is a contemporary artist whose practice explores urban materiality, fragmentation and the transformation of everyday environments through photography and collage. His work examines the physical traces of urban infrastructure, using found fragments, damaged surfaces and photographic documentation to investigate processes of deterioration, rearrangement and repair. For RAW STATES の, curated by Marie Camara for off-RCA at Niche.Show London 2026, Villanueva presents Matter / Anti-matter / Dark matter (2021), a photographic triptych examining material transformation through three conditions of an urban wall.
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Patricio Villanueva is a contemporary artist working across photography, collage and material experimentation.
His practice investigates the relationship between urban environments, physical matter and the cultural conditions embedded within everyday infrastructure.
Between 2019 and 2022, Villanueva developed a body of visual research examining damaged urban surfaces, discarded construction fragments and the unintended transformations of public structures.
In his collage series The Hand on the Rock, he combined photographs of his own hands with fragments of broken pavement salvaged from infrastructure repairs in his neighbourhood.
Through processes of fragmentation, rearrangement and reconstruction, these works explore the unstable and unpredictable conditions of the built environment.
Running parallel to his collage practice, Villanueva began photographing unintentional interventions in public structures, documenting how urban surfaces are continually altered by material deterioration, repair and human activity.
His work considers urban infrastructure not simply as a physical structure, but as a material expression of its surrounding cultural context.
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For RAW STATES の, Patricio Villanueva presents Matter / Anti-matter / Dark matter (2021), a photographic triptych developed from his research into urban infrastructure and material transformation.
The work comprises three photographs documenting different conditions of the same wall, presented in their original sequence.
Through variations in surface, texture and tonal density, the triptych reveals the changing physical character of a structure subjected to deterioration and intervention.
Rather than treating these transformations as incidental, Villanueva examines them as material events that expose the instability of constructed environments.
The work extends his broader investigation into fragmentation and repair, considering how ordinary urban surfaces can become sites of visual and conceptual enquiry.
Within RAW STATES の, the triptych explores the relationship between matter, absence and transformation, revealing how the physical conditions of a material can generate new ways of seeing.
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MATTER / ANTI-MATTER / DARK MATTER — 2021
Photographic triptych
Archival inkjet print on paper
50 × 85 cm
2021Developed as part of Patricio Villanueva's visual research between 2019 and 2022, Matter / Anti-matter / Dark matter documents three successive conditions of the same urban wall.
The photographs record unintended interventions in the built environment, revealing contrasts between exposed surfaces, partial alterations and areas of near-total darkness.
Presented as a sequence, the three images suggest different states of matter through variations in texture, density and visibility.
The work reflects Villanueva's ongoing interest in the material traces of urban transformation and the relationship between physical structures and their cultural surroundings.