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Patrick Villas (Antwerp, 1961) is a Belgian painter and sculptor.
After completing his studies, Patrick Villas began his artistic career as a painter and later also as a sculptor, with exhibitions in Belgium and abroad. His public commissions include a life-sized jaguar for the Antwerp Zoo, a life-sized tiger for Cologny, a monumental panther head for the Fondation Matmut pour l'Art, a group of running dogs for the Orne department (Normandy, France), and a fountain for the French village of Robécourt.
Writer and poet Marc Pairon describes Villas: "Patrick Villas (b. 1961) has become the leading Belgian animal sculptor of his generation. His work is marked by a continual quest to create suggestive images without adhering to strict realism. His sculptures explore the boundaries of anatomy while preserving original fluidity. Villas' recent work represents another phase of this mastery, where the sculptures are essentially gestures flowing from his soul, like a performance. The superfluous gives way to the natural. He reveals the essence of the feline—its character, inner markings, and instinctive spirit. Each animal attains its unique signature, unrecognizable by the mere skin of its species."
In 2022, Marc Pairon wrote a comprehensive art book on Patrick Villas titled *The Broken Bowl*. This title alludes to the artist’s commitment to highlighting social issues through various monuments, particularly focusing on animal suffering and humanity’s self-destruction. This art book was published by the Charles Catteau Foundation at the end of 2022.
Villas has exhibited widely across Europe since the late 1990s. Among his notable shows was a major solo exhibition at the Centre d'Art Contemporain de la Matmut in St. Pierre-de-Varengeville (near Rouen) in 2016, an outdoor exhibition of monumental pieces in Compiègne, France, in 2017, and another in Bagnoles de l'Orne in 2020. In 2022, he held a retrospective at the Centre Culturel F. Mitterrand in Neufchâteau, along with an outdoor exhibition of monumental works in the city and in Megève (FR). His works have also been showcased at international fairs such as Tefaf in Maastricht, Masterpiece in London, and PAD in Paris. In 2023 a retrospective exhibition was organised at the Musée Pompon in Saulieu, France.