Desparrame

Caravaggio says that every painting is the head of Medusa, and every painter is Perseus. And Palenzuela’s art certainly bears this out, stabbing and mortifying canvas and medium; burying them and smothering them in oil paints that sometimes bubble up out of these incontinent craters, blurring lines and boundaries to forge images that exist only in the eye of the beholder. Closer to Bram Bogart’s informalism than Jason Martin’s choreographic gesture.

He does so through lucid disenchantment, with the unaffected clarity of someone observing death unabashed and fear without lowering their gaze. A close spectator of the pornographic opulence of nature and a pauper of Pompeian houses where Dumas reinvents the term.

His interiors reflect the artist’s loyalty to the imagined space versus the itinerance of the physical spaces through which he has roamed. To journey through his spaces, he climbed onto a motorcycle in 1999 and has not climbed off yet. Like his interiors, this may have changed in terms of its physical appearance and registration number, but the imagined creation remains the same. The humidity of his interiors exude unease, and obscene nature lies beyond, spilling out beyond the margins, following Hodgkin’s breach as he painted on the frame, emphasising the act of painting on the object, and avant-garde movements linked to expressionism, which have sought to reread and reinvent the medium. Palenzuela blasts the frame to smithereens and abuses the medium, flowing out beyond the borders that were never anything of the kind, developing accidental landscapes, anachronistic and whimsical scenes in which the dented medium can only be sensed, but not demarcated, rebelling against any kind of framing.

His Seas do not evoke, they precipitate waves that gush forward and draw back just as they reach the feet of the spectator, creating a feeling of land sickness. In some of these pieces, we must take care not to be carried away by the deceptive stain, because they bear no resemblance to Monet’s serene still waters. His waters are restless like the anxiety of famished tritanopia, condemned to the continual search for its invisible dose.

The sculptural quality of his painting is just that: a quality of his painting. And it does not lose this quality, even when the volume and matter are decreased, with an impasto technique closer to that of Nicolas de Staël. With an ill-mannered brush and a knavish gesture, this is the work of someone who has been through the academy but has not lost his childlike but not naive gaze, the same gaze that led Cézanne back to the landscapes of his last period.

Foul-mouthed spatula that speaks articulately, a mordant language that defends its message vehemently. He will be absolved through his works. His painting does not require explanations, it does not need words, or brochures, or an instruction manual because with his language he says everything, so I shall hold my peace.

Pepa Sosa