Izel Villarba (b. Seattle, Washington) is a Brooklyn based artist and industrial designer currently painting with bleach on black canvas. He received his BA from the Gallatin program at New York University, studying a combination of psychology, film, and visual art. His conceptual work addresses the constant dialogue between oppositions and the fallacy in our human nature that attempts to define them. Things are never just black and white. Bleach carves away canvas like a sculpture pulled out of marble block, while at the same time the final result becomes an object floating in the void. White and black are at once contradictory and complementary, always butting heads yet always compromising in liminal space.

About Futility and Broadways

Today I spilled bleach on my skin and it corroded into something I did not know.

I tried my best to wipe it off but only came away with the bits of myself left behind.

When I looked in the mirror I could see my ribs jutting out

And remembered the feeling of scavenging through my parent’s cupboard.

On the train, they didn’t notice.

No one realized I wasn’t the same anymore,

Or that I miss home sometimes.

And this metal car feels like a roller-coaster too,

For a while ago might’ve been fun for me,

But I’m a little wiser now and fear

That I couldn’t get out if I tried or wanted to,

That the decision is not up to me or any of us really.

You see, I wasn’t always a skeleton.

I had flesh, and blood, and guts like you.

But I moved to a city of vultures,

And became intoxicated with the smell of bleach.