Raquel Aguilar takes as her starting point the Informal City, a social reality of poverty and inequality for many cities and impoverished countries, thus taking us through the neighbourhoods and landscapes of cities in Colombia and Peru. The works we can contemplate are based on the legacy of Juan Luis Piñón, Professor of urban planning at the Universitat de València.

As Piñón wrote in one of his articles in ‘La recomposición de la ciudad informal’ (The recomposition of the informal city) (2001), “human settlements grow at a dizzying rate, planned fear of the states themselves, such as the acquiescence of administrations adn the approval of governments. The marginal areas of the city multiply with no other common denominator than the uniformity of poverty, the typology of the mats, the cardboards, the plastics, the footprint of the lots and the fleeting gaze of the colonizers.”

It is in this context that the artist herself forges, in her own words, “the vocation to give continuity to an experience, to relive a life project, now alone and through that which is an inalienable and proper good for me, painting. Thus, in the will to find a pictorial solution in the reality of the informal city, is where Raquel Aguilar leaves plastic experimentation, using materials that nature itselfs suggests to us, such as beach sand, arpilleres or cardboard, retro feeding the two spheres involved in the process of creating this exhibition, pictorial and urban planning.

Raquel Aguilar (Valencia, 1980) doctor in Arts. In 2004 she started the doctoral programme “Proyectos de Pintura” at the Universitat Politècnica de València. That same year she open her first individual exhibition. In the meantime, she is writing her doctoral thesis on Morandi, dedicating a great part of her time to the field of International Cooperation and Education for Development from the NGOD of which she is a founding partner, specialized in urbanism and Informal City in Iberoamerica.

The exhibition will be opened this Wednesday, 27 November, at 19h, by Raquel Aguilar Alonso and Carles Xavier López, director of the Principal Peset Hall of Residence.

The exhibition will be open to the public from 27 November to 6 January 2019, from Tuesday to Sunday, from 11.00 a.m. to 7.00 p.m., in the Wall Room of the Rector Peset Residence Hall of the University of Valencia (Plaça del Forn de San Nicolau, 4. València).