Ryan Villamael’s deeply layered practice is informed by a rare degree of skill and dexterity as well as by vivid imagination and haunting intellectual preoccupations. He is one of the few artists of his generation to have abstained from the more liberal modes of art expression to ultimately resort to the more deliberate handiwork found in cut paper. For Villamael these paper cuts are a vehicle to both summon and tame appearances populating individual psychological landscapes as well as to map society’s ghosts, memories, and historical traces, in a cartography of things both visible and hidden, monumental and forgotten. Working with archival materials, primarily old maps and photographs, his delicate and intricate paper cuts sometimes appear to be miniature stage designs for a theatre of the absurd play on daily life, a Potemkin village whose blatant simulacrum becomes its only reality.  While his method follows the decorative nature innate to his medium of choice, from the intricately latticed constructions emerge images that defy the ornamental patchwork found in the tradition of paper cutting, and instead becomes a treatise of a unique vision that encompasses both the inner and outer conditions that occupy the psyche. These range from the oblique complexity of imagined organisms to the outright effects of living in a convoluted city.  Although his persistence in sustaining a discipline more often subjected to handicraft has been evident from his works, Villamael maintains that his primary interest lies rather on the conceptual significance of craft in the process of creating contemporary art, and continues to recognize the possibility of how his works can still evolve under this light.