SANTIAGO PALENZUELA
TENERIFE, 1967
Santiago Palenzuela (Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain, 1967), an artist whose work has a great material thickness, being the painting not what slides across the smooth surface of the canvas, but what protrudes from it, the final object-painting. The images of closed interior rooms, perhaps the place for the separation between the painter and the world, contrast with the ostensible exteriority of his painting, which is thrown into empty space. His work could move from a visceral order to a collected chaos, a conjectural state where painting begins to order everything. Since his beginnings he has been looking for a personal art, mainly through oil painting. After graduating he participated in various workshops, which were led by artists such as Jiri Georg Dokupil, Guido Kolistcher or Mark Dagley. Since 1992, his work has been shown in more than sixty solo and group exhibitions held in galleries, museums and art centers in the Canary Islands, Madrid, Segovia, Bratislava and Prague. His solo shows include Pintura cadáver (Pintura cadáver (Casa de los Coroneles, Fuerteventura, 2016 and La Regenta, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2015), Quemando lienzo (Espacio Canarias de Madrid, 2012), De alquiler en alquiler (Gabinete Literario de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2010 and Sala de Arte Instituto Cabrera Pinto de La Laguna, 2009), among others. Palenzuela has received several awards and recognitions, including the Puerto de La Luz and Las Palmas Painting Prize and the Excelens Painting Prize awarded by the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.