But, this… is it a photo or is it a painting? That’s the question many people probably ask themselves when they see José Miguel Palacio’s paintings. There you have them: the high-speed trains in Atocha, the cars stuck in Gran Vía, the airplanes in Terminal 4, the downtown shop windows, the neon lights, the pure Madrid life captured with total accuracy in his canvases, which are on display at the Ansorena gallery (Alcalá, 52) until June 1. It gives the impression that one could enter the painting and take, for example, a city bus.
It is hyperrealism: after the invention of photography, modern artists, from the impressionists onwards, began to move further and further away from the faithful representation of reality and started to get into the twists and turns of abstraction and concepts. But then, in the sixties, the photorealists or hyperrealists arrived, who not only reflected reality as it is, but also took a photograph as a model.
But what is the point of creating an image that a camera can already create? Indeed, photography is what best reproduces the scene in front of you,” explains Palacio (Zaragoza, 1950), “what happens is that our work at a certain distance is totally photographic, but when you get closer it becomes a painting. You can see the brushstroke perfectly. That’s where you can appreciate our work, and that’s the good thing about it, because if you didn’t appreciate that nuance, what we would have is a mere photograph”.
Although reality is becoming increasingly blurred, Madrid has been very hyperrealist lately: a retrospective of the genre, Hyperrealism 1967-2012, can also be seen at the Thyssen Museum at this time, where, as in Palacio’s work, what predominates are urban and popular motifs. “What we do is to capture what we are living,” says the painter. “There have been times when we have painted farms or naval battles, because at that time those stories were being lived. Right now what is being lived is the urban and I think it is very good that we are a reference of the time we have lived for posterity. We are reporters of this time. And what better way to date an image than advertising posters or automobiles, which are frequent in Palacio’s paintings. “License plates, advertisements, billboards are real, and they can temporarily position a scene with a margin of error of about five to ten years.”
Gran Vía Shop Windows
The precision with which the reflections are reproduced is very striking, one of the painter’s favorite effects: shop windows or bus windows in which the city streets are reflected, the playfulness of the light. “In reality the reflection is always there, we do nothing more than capture it. When you look at a photograph you don’t notice the reflection, because it’s taken for granted. But here it catches your attention because we have painted it with precision.” When Palacio walks through the city and sees a scene that interests or moves him, he takes note of the space-time coordinates and returns another day at the same time (to have the same light) to take several photographs, which will serve as a model. “We need an education to look at what happens on the street,” he says, “we tend to perceive more than other people, when we look we see many things that for others go unnoticed. That’s because we look for them.
Would you paint other cities? “I paint Madrid because it provides me with scenes that I am looking for and that interest me. I’m from Aragon, and I’ve painted Zaragoza a few times, but it doesn’t provide me with this hustle and bustle, the rush of people and cars, this hectic life we lead here. My relationship with the city is a bit of love-hate. Of course I would paint Hong Kong or New York… but, for example, Barcelona has a very marked idiosyncrasy that does not offer me the hustle and bustle of Madrid”. When you leave the exhibition and return to the “mogollón” of the real Madrid, be careful not to leave, instead of through the gallery door, through one of the two large paintings that, at the entrance, reproduce the Gran Vía as if it were alive.
Enlace: http://ccaa.elpais.com/ccaa/2013/04/26/madrid/1367003119_668488.html
SERGIO C. FANJUL
