Villains’ Game

Escombro, in collaboration with Privada Pública, is pleased to present Villains’ Game, a solo exhibition by artist Napoleón Aguilera (b. 1986, Zapopan, Jalisco), organized as part of its Program for Cultural and Social Interaction (PICS), through the artist’s support from PECDA Jalisco grant. The ways we learn to imagine violence often begin as play. Long before we recognize the real weight of a weapon, its presence is softened through fiction: cartoons, television series, films, video games, and toys transform threat into spectacle and danger into entertainment. Within these narratives, weapons cease to function solely as instruments of destruction and instead become symbols of power, desire, adventure, or identity. Villains’ Game emerges from this subliminal premise. The exhibition brings together a series of eight sculptures carved from basalt, obsidian, and blue calcite, inspired by iconic firearms from science fiction works across various entertainment platforms. Each piece incorporates authentic firearm grips acquired through the black market in Guadalajara, adorned with iconography associated with criminal organizations in Mexico. By bringing together these two elements —the fantasies of mass media and the material traces of violence— the sculptures create an unsettling shift that prompts reflection on our patterns of consumption and the ways violence infiltrates, often unconsciously, our collective aspirations. The project takes its title from the popular Spanish saying, “Juego de manos, es de villanos” (“hands play is a villain’s game”), a warning commonly used to mark the moment when childhood play loses its innocence and begins to escalate into physical aggression. Here, the phrase serves as a conceptual catalyst: At what point does the representation of violence cease to be simulation and become a normalized practice within everyday life? How much of our collective imagination has been shaped by objects designed to inflict harm? Carved from basalt, obsidian, and blue calcite sourced from quarries in San Lucas Evangelista, Magdalena, and Durango, the sculptures maintain a direct relationship with the territory and the material traditions of each region. The firearm grips function as a crucial point of tension within the exhibition. Many of these objects circulate with relative ease through informal markets and local jewelry shops in Guadalajara. Their presence reveals the ways in which certain criminal imaginaries have been absorbed into popular aesthetics, continuously oscillating between fascination, aspiration, and threat. In Villains’ Game, science-fiction weapons lose their status as imaginary props and acquire a physical and symbolic weight more closely aligned with our immediate reality. The works do not seek to glorify violence; rather, they expose the persistent ways it permeates entertainment and the construction of identity. Through sculpture, the project proposes a reflection on the cultural mechanisms that transform violence into a familiar, appealing, and even desirable language. Situated between toy and weapon, fantasy and territory, the sculptures in Villains’ Game confront viewers with ambiguous objects: relics of a childhood mediated by fiction, but also remnants of a reality in which violence has learned to disguise itself as style, consumption, and spectacle.