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Two I
Original title: Dos I
1999
Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 173.5 x 172 cm
Reference: ACF0780
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For Pablo Palazuelo, the most profound way of working is to obey "a slow spontaneity", which corresponds to the way life itself makes itself and through which he can develop his intuitions.
Drawing is the seed from which the work springs, the basic structure from which the families of forms emerge through metamorphic generation. Forms, as prolific as large families, always come from one another and are generated from the memory which imagines and invents rather than the memory which remembers. A memory which, according to Palazuelo, flows from one drawing to another, from one picture to the next. "And if I interrupt them it is because of saturation, not because they do not contain other possibilities. The fact is you become saturated with a particular family, its lineage. I call it 'lineage', which comes from the word 'line'."
His painting sets out to express continuity; the continuity of painting and life, because, like the world, they neither begin nor end; they are in constant movement and endless growth.
These three pictures are from the nineties, when Palazuelo had been an internationally recognised public figure for over forty years. And so, rather than to the painter's maturity -which he had indeed reached-, they correspond to the extraordinary direction his work has taken in this latest period.
The brightness with which they shine separately and the host of variations we recognise when we look at them in a single space bear witness to their main aesthetic belief: that the expressive continuity of forms is endless and sequential. They are distinguished by their aerial qualities -which differentiate them from earlier denser, more compact pieces- and a musical sound given off by the painted surface.
Sylva is made up exclusively of line. It belongs to a family of works done with an extremely rigorous formal economy, where the angular exchanges in the drawing of the lines indicate an atonal rhythm. The title refers to the Latin word for forest. However, La tarde provides us with a possible analysis of the use of colour in his work, whose substance he claims to be form as well. "I like to saturate the imagined colour," he says, "because through colour we can express the profound dynamics which occur between the soul and nature, the ties that secretly bind them. […] For me they symbolise the profound dynamics between psychic energy and material. They are symbols of the soul."
I regard the painting as closely related to the "Danza" series, although that uses more reds and blues, and to a picture from the same year, Concierto, which takes what are horizontals here into the vertical.
Lastly, in Dos I, painted only in greys, whites and midnight blue, a counterpointed dialogue opens up between two equally powerful and visually subtle figures. The spectator senses that, rather than deciphering them, what he has to do is to encode them in relation to himself, with his possibility of "seeing" in the forms.
