FORMATOCOMODO presents the show Fluid Flow by Javier Palacios, his first exhibition in Madrid. 

From January 23th to April 6th of 2021. 
                              
 

JAVIER PALACIOS (1985 , Jerez de la Frontera

My work is developed as a questioning and vindication of the painting language. I want to demonstrate its importance and validity, throughout a dialogue between its traditional traits and the advances of the audiovisual field.

An important part of my artistic process is the selection and construction of images that I use as references for my painting. On one hand, I use images found on the internet that I retouch and decontextualize in the search for new relationships and meanings.

On the other hand, I make my own models with waste materials. With them I make photography sessions in which I filter and digitally alter the images; these images will be used afterwards for its translation into the pictorial language. This process produces a continuous dialogue between virtual image, sculpture, photography and painting that are contained in the final result.

The models I build as references for my paintings have been becoming more relevant – to the point where I begin to think about them as sculptures that can have a relationship with the paintings in the same environment.

When translating from photography image to pictorial, I seek to enhance the inherent characteristics of both languages: definition of details, framing, volume rendering and photography blur; the colour, texture and materiality of painting. During this process the technique plays an important role, the medium gets transformed suggesting interesting new solutions as I move forward.

What really inspires me about the creative process is the ability to reach our emotional side through the intellectual fact in such straight forward way. The excitation of neurons. The neuronal firing.

The iconic permanence of the image, the strangeness of the perceptual dimension, the power of quotidian shapes and structures that make the visual dimension, the radical changes of contemporary beauty are my objects of analysis.

The study of these matters has triggered a decrease of representation in the pictorial images. Not to erase it, but to paradoxically boost it. This creates mixed feelings for the observer, who knows that he stands before an element or object that may exist, but which has in turn become enigmatic and unrecognizable. The antagonism between abstraction and figuration is therefore questioned. The illusion of abstraction steams from what may apparently be representative.

All the artworks are related by the common feeling that something disturbing is behind seemingly beautiful and frivolous images, as close to pop images hiding something defective inside. A fluctuation between a superficial and deeper level that suggest this hypothesis, updating Paul Valery’s radically contemporary words: "The deepest is the skin".