The Eye of the Owl
Rubbers International Gallery
Prologue by Eduardo Stupía:
A DRESSER MICROCOSM
There is a sense of night vigil and patience in the reticulated weave that Candelaria Palacios unstrings with great industriousness. Her loving, disciplined style, with a plethora or graphic richness, nourished by the artist’s tireless ability to unstring textures and indefinable
pure-line corporeal elements, seems to be intimately related to the tradition that makes manual work one of the means of introspection, which she reinvents in a drawing of considerable power of suggestion and unexpected lyricism. With an indispensable amount of attention, of meditative concentration, Palacios’ practical conscience is revealed with a vital splendor and an almost biological naturalness that seems to deny all effort and sets up a game of multiple references to completely diverse universes of images.
Immersed in black backgrounds of spectral darkness that evoke the never-ending night, always subject to apparitions and fables, or dazzled by the light of the sheet of paper that allows us to see in detail its heterogeneous physical quality, which seems to be made out of lace and knit fabrics, we find the soft architectures, the allusions to multicellular organisms, the conglomeration of submarine or subterranean formations, the aerial views of uncertain orography, the interwoven cloths, veils and rags, overlapping to form grids, or frayed as if in a dark sea of dissolution. And also, in a very precise and descriptive manner, the botanical antlers and countryside elegance of a landscape so arboreal and full of flowers as mysterious and extraterritorial. The artist takes hold of all this convincing display with no raving or strains, enthusiastic in her rigor for crossings, accumulation and entanglement, a silent celebrator of a compact and obsessive operation, in spite of which in her lives on a fresh sensation of dynamism, of prolific metamorphosis.
The bone whiteness of this type of drawn passementerie, vibrant in its pointillist incandescence, is the tonal cannon that define the pulse and the identity of the whole exhibition, and it is in that predominance that the illuminated variants, of black lines and colored areas on white planes, seem even more exceptional when they work as ceremonious counterpoints. The animation, also included in the exhibition, seems to have the same function of introducing an apparently foreign element –a roughly outlined minuscule and brief fable, acted out by doodles that want to become insects and vice versa– which still invites everyone to read the whole system as the sleepless daydream of a stroller burning the midnight oil, lost among the nests of termites or blinded by ghost light. Whatever the case may be, this real dresser microcosm, delightful product of an imagination freed from ties and embracing adventure, has the inductive effect of a formative big-bang that spreads in very different shapes and phantasmagorias in order to attract, unsettle and trap, with the allure of a spider web, the most experienced spectator.
April 2015