City inspiring stories, painted or written, the painter Palacio – “obsessed by Madrid”, Juan Manuel Bonet would say-, travels from the ground level, -the street and commerce, its lights or shadows, passers-by and emigrants, mimes, sellers or beggars-, towards the vault. Sometimes, as in the beautiful Richard Estes-like paintings, they are paintings in which the landscape is reflected in the glass, resulting in a happy encounter between the two, ground or city versus sky-sky-cloud, like a trompe l’oeil of the aforementioned hyperreality, an exchange of the city and its reflection, urban mirrors, in the tautological words of the artist. And an immoderate sky (I analyze now his airs and they are always different), remains in his canvases as a background for the chosen fragments of the city. An artist who devours the urban scenery, who likes to make it evident but without diminishing the mystery, Palacio belongs to the lineage of the flâneurs, of the strollers who understand the metropolis as a fantastic place where events take place, -it wasa magnificent city, Georges Hugnet would say-,
Alfonso de la Torre
