…. we are indeed before a “flâneur” of the capital, before someone who, although he does not live in it 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 its Grand Canal; the buses are its gondolas; the shop windows, its gallery of mirrors; the Canal Theater, its Fenice; the skyscrapers, its Salute; the Airbuses, its Bucentauro….
Juan Manuel Bonet
