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).
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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.
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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.
First name: Oramas. Palmero has been engaging in dialogue with him for decades, he whose life was cut so tragically short but who produced such a dazzling body of work. Sunny paintings, yes, radiant, of great poetic intensity, both those of Oramas and those of Palmero, who already wrote about his illustrious predecessor in number 15 of Syntaxis, and who already saw his paintings as talismans. One of Palmero’s most Oramasian pieces is, even in the title itself, Casas del risco (Houses on the cliff, 1993). Others: those from the 1994 series La casa del mar (House by the sea), with its bright reds, yellows and blues. In our conversation in Lanzarote, he makes it abundantly clear, when he defines the painting of his predecessor referring to the minimum pretexts on which he builds: “house, wall, door, pitera plant.” And also: “a painter of middays”, “from the midday sun to leaden grey”. In the paintings encompassed within this current series, which is titled Paisaje insular (Island Landscape), a series of multi-coloured geometries, he once again begins with the geometry of the humble Canary home, first captured by Oramas in his hymns to the Riscos of Las Palmas, seen from the window of the sanatorium where he would ultimately die, so young. It is exciting to see that four decades later, a now mature Palmero is still a devotee of Oramas, never parodying him. For my part, I will quote the poem that completes the sweet geometry: “Verses like paintings like canary houses, in sweetness they endure” (“sweetness”, in green).
Second name: the Lebanese artist Etel Adnan. In 2021, art critic Álvaro Rodriguez Fominaya, from Gran Canaria, presented a retrospective of her work at the C3A in Cordoba, which he directed at the time, just a few days before the artist died in Paris, practically in the shadow of my Saint-Sulpice, where Sánchez Robayna, who corresponded with her, suggested that we go to visit her, and how nice it would have been for us to do that. A retrospective that would later visit Tenerife, thanks to TEA. Adnan’s unique way of mixing geometry and nature, order and intuition, image and word, has all the elements required to seduce Palermo, who in this series entitled Aeteladnan, a free and happy series, at once abstract and figurative, with an elementary poetry, at times almost playful, pays tribute to this solitary artist who only gained international visibility late in the day . Some might say, unlike Adnan, he has not cultivated verse. To which one might reply that in his aphorisms, in his fragments, in his brief forms, Palmero is just as much a poet as she is. And this is true almost from the outset, when, as a student in Barcelona, where he graduated in Fine Arts in 1984, he already admired Foix, and Joan Brossa’s Poemes civils.
In a letter from 1987, Brossa calls Palmero a “measurer of transparencies”, a rather fortuitous formula, and sends him an expressive “bravo” for his paintings, and for his “great little texts”, in which he saw, between exclamations, “a wonderful touch of poetry”. Given the date, he is clearly acknowledging receipt of Fragmentos, published by the Casa de la Cultura in Yaiza, and we should underscore the close attention with which Brossa read this tome: not only did he look at the sequence of images, but he detected the six textual fragments, composed in such a small hand that he might not have noticed them, but did. Six years later, Escalas opened precisely with a Brossian haiku, so minimalist and at the same time so essentially figurative that it is understandable that the painter might appropriate it: “El cel / a dalt i el mar / a baix”.
Gerwald Rockenschaub, the third and last name on the list in this exhibition will be the subject of an ephemeral mural about which, at the time of writing, I know nothing but the intention to do so. Once again, the temptation, in Palmero, to intervene directly on the wall, in line with his aphorism that constitutes an entire programme: “Transform the cold white walls of the rooms into warm white colouristic walls.” Less known than other more anguished Austrian painters, for whom my enthusiasm is limited, in my view Rockenschaub is, like Caramelle, one of the most interesting figures from that scene. I especially like his way of combining a basically geometric, post-minimalist sensitivity, and certain hints of pop art, all with great joy, and always awakening our smile.
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