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AtGalería Artizar we cannot hide our satisfaction for having the opportunity to present the most recent work by Santiago Palenzuela(Santa Cruz de Tenerife, 1967). We are aware that, by doing so, we are reviving our own story, while at the same time we are celebrating the career of an artist who, over the last two decades, has turned painting into a ring where to live and blow off some existential steam. And this is not for the sake of achieving any victory over himself but rather—as real artists do—for getting to the heart of a lived moment, a real moment.
Many years have passed since Palenzuela made his memorable first solo exhibition at Galería Artizar. “Retrato de Luis Feria” [“A Portrait of Luis Feria”] (2000) was a test to approach the poet’s image, who had passed away two years before, using 18 paintings to reconstruct his presence; but above all it was also a real statement of principles that would underpin not only the nature of his work but its aesthetics too: painting would be a field of combat; painting would be to the death, and oil painting would be by shovels…
Since then, the belligerent profession of Palenzuela has been uprooting from his insides and rooms a ravished, fragmented, excessive painting, which is nevertheless able to welcome us into its intimacy and possess us.
“Odio sobre lienzo” [Hate on Canvas] is the title under which he exhibits at Artizar two new series on the inside: “La casa de Rubens Henríquez” [“Rubens Henríquez’s House”] and “Duggi 36”, in which Palenzuela’s ‘pictorial’ objects are inner spaces once again, places of the self where painting accommodates its rooms. Along with them, “Búfalo y tigresa” [“Buffalo and Tigress”] a work exhibited in 2011 as part of the exhibition “Cuchilleros” [“Cutlers”], but in later years converted to its breathtaking current version, and last, a set of works (still lives, vanitas, animals, portraits…)—pictorial studies with the precision of the Dutch school and the skill of a goldsmith to which Palenzuela has devoted himself in recent times and which he is also moving to a rickety table now in order to create the features of a still life of the ethereal.
