Fernando Castro Florez
“Another painter of modern life.”
Book “José Miguel Palacio Madrid Urbano”.
October 2006
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 mere apology. Since 2003, he begins to fix scenes, sensations and characters from Madrid, without any casteism or mere documentary will, trying to access, as Palacio himself indicates, to the “idiosyncrasy of a global metropolis.
José Miguel Palacio distances himself, fortunately and consciously, from this neo-objectivity, he is not obsessed by the frontality of a harmonizing photography of 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.
There are many risks that besiege cities, for example, uniformity (multiplication of depersonalized spaces), extension (loss of the boundaries marked by the urban) or implosion (the tearing apart of the peripheries). 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 locate(se) even if it is through the details and without homogenizing the multiplicity of the everyday.
The city disappears as a place of memory, as a transit for dialogue, as a place 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 daily turbulence.
José Miguel Palacio uses the city of Madrid as an ethnographer but without scientific intention, on the contrary, leaving his feelings encrypted, combining, in the Baudelairean manner, the eternal with the ephemeral.
This artist is, like Constantin Guys, another painter of modern life who makes the ephemeral memorable, who seeks, in the facades and fragments of the city or in the faces captured in passing, winks of complicity, that glance of the other that sets desire in motion.
Carlos Delgado Mayordomo
“Beyond Urban Reality.”
Exhibition at the Tomás y Valiente Art Center, Fuenlabrada, Madrid.
May 2009
It matters little not to know how to find one’s way in the city,” said Walter Benjamin. But getting lost in it, like getting lost in the forest, requires an apprenticeship”.
José Miguel Palacio’s complex analysis of the dynamic components of the city fragments the real and offers us the resulting concepts as part of a fluid territory; he brings together imaginative, emotional and social layers; he proposes, in short, to inhabit a territory without pretending to be a replica of it.
Juan Manuel Bonét
“A modern” “Vedutista”.
Commemorative Exhibition of the 25th anniversary of the Casa de Cultura de Torrelodones, Torrelodones, Madrid.
April 2012
Indeed, we are before a “flâneur” of the capital, before someone who, although he does not live there but in its most peaceful periphery, needs to peek almost daily into its streets and squares, to submerge himself in its crowds a bit like Edvard Munch submerged himself in those of Oslo or Paris, to inhale what a Mexican stridentista would call the “smell of gasoline”, to see his own face reflected in those shop windows that constitute one of his obsessions -the day we were introduced, I told him: “ah, the painter of shop windows”-, as they constituted for some of his American predecessors.
José Miguel Palacio, in the end, is the closest thing I know to a modern “vedutista”. The Gran Via is his Gran Canal; the buses are his gondolas; the shop windows, his gallery of mirrors; the Canal Theater, his Fenice; the skyscrapers, his Salute; the Airbuses, his Bucentauro…
Alfonso de la Torre
“The ambition behind the fascination.”
Exhibition Centro de Arte de Alcobendas, Alcobendas, Madrid.
December 2016
City that inspires 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, vendors or beggars-, to the vault.
Sometimes, as in the beautiful Richard Estes-like paintings, they are paintings in which the landscape is reflected in the crystals, 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 a disproportionate 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 obvious 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-.
