For Pablo Palazuelo, the most profound way of working was by obeying “slow spontaneity”, which reflected his approach to life in general and allowed him to develop his intuition.
The drawing: the root or seed from which the artwork grows, the foundation that has given birth to families of forms for metamorphic generations. Forms, as prolific as big families, always engender other forms, generated by the memory that imagines and invents more so than by the memory that remembers. According to the artist, it is a memory that flowed from drawing to drawing, from one painting to the next. “And if I interrupt them, it is due to saturation, not because the possibilities have been exhausted. What happens, is you end up saturated by one specific family, by its lineage. I call it lineaje, which is where the wordlinaje [lineage] comes from.”
His painting strove to express a sense of continuity; the continuity of painting and of life, because both—like the world itself—have neither beginning nor end, existing instead in a state of constant movement and endless growth.
These three paintings are from the nineties, when Pablo Palazuelo had already spent more than forty years in the public eye garnering international recognition. More than an expression of the painter’s mature age—amply reached by then—these pieces reflect the extraordinary direction that his work took during this final period.
The intensity that each individual painting radiates, and the multiplicity of variations one sees when contemplating them together in the same space, prove their main, aesthetic conviction: the expressive continuity of form is endless and sequential. Their aerial qualities stand out—differentiating them from earlier pieces that are more compact and dense—as does the rhythmic musicality that pushes through the painted surface.
Sylvais constructed using nothing but the line. It belongs to a family of works marked by a strict economy of form in which the angular exchange in the drawing of the lines suggests an atonal rhythm. The title is a reference to the Latin word for “forest”. The afternoon, on the other hand, suggests a possible analysis of the artist’s use of colour. In referring to the substance of colour, he stated that it also constitutes a form. “I like to saturate the imagined colour,” he said, “Because through colour, one can express the deep dynamics that exist between the soul and nature, the ties that secretly bind them. [...] To me, they symbolise the deep dynamics between psychic and material energy. They are symbols of the soul.”
The painting strikes me as being closely related to the series ‘Danza’—although the latter tends towards reds and blues—and to a painting of the same year, Concierto, in which vertical lines replace the horizontals of this piece.
Finally, inDos I, painted solely in shades of grey, white and midnight blue, we see a competing dialogue between two equally powerful and visually subtle figures. The spectator senses that instead of decoding them, he should encode them in relation to himself, in relation to his possibility of “seeing” into the forms.
