“The multiple vision of Madrid offered by José Miguel Palacio is, no doubt, an attempt to build a poetics of the city in which he moves away from defeatism or a mere apology. Since 2003 he begins to fix scenes, sensations and characters from Madrid, with no casteism or mere documentary will, trying to access, as Palacio himself indicates, to the “idiosyncrasy of a global metropolis“.
“José Miguel distances himself, fortunately and consciously, from this neo-objectivity, he is not obsessed by the frontality of the harmonizing photography of the conflict, nor does he pretend to reduce everything to formal aestheticism. This creator wants the city to make sense again and not to be a mere facade, a mirage without soul”.
“José Miguel Palacio travels through the city of Madrid like an ethnographer but without scientific intention, on the contrary, leaving his feelings encrypted, combining, in the Baudelairean manner, the eternal with the ephemeral”.
“The city disappears as a place of memory, as a transit for dialogue, as an enclosure in which to exchange the subjective word, that is, as the territory of our own existence. But, I insist, José Miguel Palacio turns his art into an allegory of the necessary metropolitan dialogue, of the urgency to recover our vital space in the midst of the daily turbulence”.
“There are many risks that besiege cities, but the most difficult to suture of all is the impossibility of identifying with the space we inhabit, a permanent dislocation. I think that the work of José Miguel Palacio responds to the deep desire to localize, even if only through details and without homogenizing the multiplicity of everyday life”.
“José Miguel Palacio delivers in his work a panorama of a place where it is possible to find the magical, which is nothing more than something that reveals itself in the bosom of everyday life. He knows that pessimism or the apocalyptic gesture are, to a certain extent, gratuitous and that they are part of the current bunker mentality that refuses to surrender to the trajectories of the outside.”
“The work of José Miguel Palacio provokes an encounter with the sublime, it has something of a spark or flash, what we expect in that moment without chronology is the advent of poetry. That metaphysical shiver, typical of the sublime feeling, leaves us, in all senses, speechless: it is the presence, with its darkness, luxury and silence that invites us to stop.”
