Paul Villinski: Between the Deed and the Doing

Paul Villinski’s work navigates a precise balance between the grounded and the airborne, transforming discarded materials into images of ascent while never concealing their origins. Butterflies cut from found beer cans, gilded, painted in cobalt Flashe, and dusted with soot, and wings assembled from hundreds of worn work gloves reveal an alchemy rooted in manual labor and everyday life. His installations retain a poetic sense of flight while conjuring the ordinary realities from which they emerge, from industrial debris to last night’s trash.

Villinski’s practice also draws on childhood imagination and the desire to transcend one’s circumstances, expressed through objects that merge the industrial with the intimate. A dress stitched from work gloves, a vast wing span mounted on a child’s chair, or a single aluminum butterfly emerging from a glove suggest a language where labor, memory, and aspiration intersect. Across the work, flight appears not as fantasy but as a process shaped by real transformation, echoed in the artist’s own pursuit of flying and his study of butterfly species raised in his studio.