NEW FRAGMENTS FOR LUIS PALMERO

Juan Manuel Bonet

“Any wisp of Luis Palmero’s work interests me.”

There is always something musical in the way Palmero – also an instrumentalist, a double bass player to be precise – works, very much in the vein of Le Violon d’Ingres. We share a passion for two monotonous greats, composers of piano pieces that are, at one and the same time, restrained and yet full of emotion: Erik Satie and Morton Feldman. Two composers, moreover, capable of smiling, just like Palmero.

 

His studio-home in La Laguna: a place to understand the harmony between his life, his tastes, and a body of work in which, although it develops along avenues traced decades ago, new perspectives are constantly opening up, new branches, new digressions. All in serenity, in search of tranquillity, never an easy feat. The closeness of his lifelong home to nature, through tropical plants that bring to mind the love for them also felt by Matisse or Ellsworth Kelly, somehow even more French and Matissian. And then there is the imposing presence, on the back wall, of the library. Inevitably we continue, sweet condemnation, with printed paper. Whenever I visit this studio, something that also happens to me in the studios of other bibliophile painters (I am thinking for example of José María Báez almost in the shadow of the mosque in Cordoba, Alejandro Corujeira in Madrid, or Dis Berlin in Aranjuez, three of the nine painters Palermo coincided with in Geometric Dreams in 1993, my collective exhibition in Arteleku, and then in Madrid, in Elba Benítez), I take the opportunity to see which lighthouses are guiding him, what he is reading, which albums he is leafing through and which give him pause for reflection (with Báez, he also put on a joint exhibition, Con-jugar, in 2000 in Manuel Ojeda).

[…]

In praise of the spatula, and in that practice, which marked a turning point in his work, previously lighter in its construction, one particular lighthouse for him, circa 2006, was the second Luis Feito, of the yellow and red and burning oranges: see for example Number 460-A (1963), one of the best pieces in the Museum of Spanish Abstract Art in Cuenca. Clouds applied with a spatula and a smiling evocation of the ice cream parlour, where chocolate and vanilla, strawberry and pistachio are combined: the titles of the series – part of which was seen in his Artizar show Estrellarse (Crashing, 2006), titled in the catalogue with a seafaring verse by the unforgettable Emilio Adolfo Westphalen – are generic, Two flavours, Three flavours, and so on. An elegantly everyday Palmero, sophisticated and ironic, subtly neo-Fifties. From that side, which, as the artist himself has indicated, sometimes brushes up against a pop aesthetic and at the same time a frozen gesturalism (the painter was always interested in a certain Gerhard Richter), I especially like his evocation of grey clouds, the theme of clouds being practically absent from his previous work, relentlessly sunny, radiant, immaculate.

[…]

In the exhibition dubbed Celebración (Celebration), for which I am writing these lines, Palmero pays tribute to three painters: José Jorge Oramas, Ethel Adnan, and the more unexpected (and here, less known) Gerwald Rockenschaub. Another step on his journey, returning once again to Artizar, an exhibition space that, generation after generation, is faithful to him, as he is faithful to it.

PROJECTS
Next exhibition

CARLOS NICANOR

OPENING_        APRIL, 26