Variations of Nothing

The Substance of Nothing, by Kurt McVey

Creativity, one would think or hope, is a major component of being an artist. But what are the limits of creativity when contemporary artists are so often compelled, by the media, the market, the movements of the day, to formulate and to a large degree lock into a signature style, a language, or even more taboo but sadly all too true, a recognizable brand, and in perpetuity?

Juan Miguel Palacios is an artist, perhaps more specifically, a painter, who is beholden to the unstoppable nature of growth and the destabilizing, at times perplexing power of evolution.

When an artist stumbles upon that signature set of factors, as they emerge by way of their presumably unique practice, tethered as these sensorial signifiers might be to the discourse (spoken or written, internal or external) around the work, this could be referred to as a sort of institutional happy place. Writers feel relevant and therefore the work finds its way into the criticism and press coverage of the day. Collectors collect. The heat turns up. All spokes of the institutional art wheel rejoice in consolidated, synergistic, fully functional harmony. It works!

So if it ain't broke, as they say, why fix it? Here, one could insert the image of any under-the-sea crustacean in need of a new shell, at various points of the lifecycle and in shifting states of comfort and distress, safety and vulnerability, complacent stagnation versus bold locomotion in action. So many artists allow themselves to get crushed under the relative safety of a particular “aesthetic as brand,” bloated, but shielded as they might be from the harshness and uncertainty of the outside world, nevertheless suffocated by a gilded prison of familiarity and sweet success.

Palacios could easily have slid into a signature shell of this sort with his still (among certain concentric art circles) iconic, sculpturally deconstructed drywall paintings, which he made and presented in earnest through 2018. Palacios would begin these works by painting on thin panels of vinyl using industrial, oil-based house paint, which would eventually be layered over a slab of battered drywall. Regarding this series, Palacio has previously stated, “I use a wall, hard and heavy, as a symbol of a stable structure but constant aggressions have destroyed it.”

The artist didn’t discriminate between the various ways in which he could damage or destroy the drywall foundations of his work, whether this involved tools of varying degrees of convention, or using his own hands and feet. He would later polish the edges of these impact cavities with a blowtorch and supplement the textural dimensionality with the introduction of polyester foam resin. The works would be finished with a layer of paint thinner, which would be altered with fingernail-imposed scratchitti. The focal point or outwardly figurative subject of these paintings alternated between beautiful women and jackals (hyenas); an oscillating commentary on predator and prey, victim and villain, creation and destruction. These works pierced through the rote trope of the two-dimensional, rectangular canvas on a white wall, while still playing the game and at a level that could have carried Palacios into the same predictable yet highly esteemed realms as Kehinde Wiley with his tried and true M.O., but perhaps seen through the kitsch deconstructed sculptural pop-prism of Daniel Arsham. Palacios had to keep it moving.

After a brief foray into a series that featured pigs (a metaphorical Animal Farm shift away from the hyena), which was another, perhaps cynical commentary on some of the ways and forms in which the more pernicious symptoms of capitalism reduce Man, this creature said to be made in God’s image, to something less noble than our farmyard brethren; Palacios understood this was no place to settle. He needed to get his own frustrations that come with the trappings of a successful artist out of his system, while shaking off the funk of certain gratuitous personal politicians and other toxic bad faith actors in the wider culture. Of course, one look only to the family surnames on certain museum wings to bathe in the destructive hypocrisies of the day.

Much has been discussed about Palacios’ struggles with chronic back pain, which necessitated numerous surgeries throughout the last decade. Something as pervasive and disruptive as back pain, as well as the surgeries required to mitigate this pain, should lead any listener to the topic of painkillers, then right on over to the opioid epidemic, which, despite moving out of the larger zeitgeist, it would appear, continues to plague the United States of America especially. Though greedy, apathetic, hypocritical pigs abound, destroying individual souls, families and communities, this is no place for a deeply empathic, but perhaps restless artist to settle, aesthetically or thematically. Palacios’ pig paintings are artifacts of protest, not so interested in biting the hand that feeds, but giving the hand a taste of its own medicine, its own putrid refuse, but rendered in intoxicating, playful pastels, and served up by a passionate, creative hand.

After returning to Spain, the artist’s mother country, for another back surgery (Palacios, nimble, capable in his new Brooklyn studio, might be seeing the light), Palacios was ready for something more optimistic, less cynical, less blatantly representational, even if there was sufficient metaphorical subtext, however thinly veiled. As of this writing, America’s fascination and responsibility to hyper-political, compounded representational painting seems to be fading from cultural prominence, despite notions of diversity and inclusion remaining important in both private galleries and museums. As a counterpoint, the brazenly decorative is returning; paintings with patterns that carry socio-political or geographical context as opposed to the figure; the figure already moving past diminishing notions of leisure and “being” as rebellion.

It’s here that Palacios now arrives at a new language, a new signature, and quite happily it would appear. It arrived through an organic process involving his body, heart, mind and soul, as these in unity interface with a rapidly changing world, not excluding the art world microcosm. After experimenting or freestyling with acrylic paint on canvas by way of action painting and color theory manifestation, at first in a flat, conceptual void, Palacios understood that contemporary abstraction itself, for the artist and the viewer, is rarely enough these days. Not for the trained eye and eternally hungry heart, at least. Not three decades into the new millennium. Even German artist Gerhard Richter’s latest offerings, his mostly 2021 Cage Paintings, currently up through June 2023 at Gagosian Gallery (New York and Beverly Hills), though masterful in color, composition and layered application, feel helplessly, hopelessly 20th century.

To answer the question of where painting is going, is to witness where Palacios has recently arrived, vulnerable in the newness of his latest vessel (aesthetic language), but as a painter, an organism, a human being, he stands stronger, cleaner, more pure than his previous incarnation.

Palacios’ colorforms float, spill, bounce and dance on an ombré pictureplane with little to no hint of a horizon. But there is no disorientation. The shapes, whether non-corporeal astral forms observed via the third eye during a transformative psychedelic trip, or deep sea worms in some impossibly cold trench, or microscopic quantum critters, all matriculate from simple color splashes or painterly strokes, too often presented elsewhere as uninspired abstract fodder, with the introduction of corresponding shadows, which Palacios deftly layers in with a simple smudging technique, creating instant dimensionality and infinite conceptual intrigue. These shadows give body and life to the inanimate. The landscapes, if they can be called that, point to various archetypes of earthly terrain-the field, the desert, or the ocean floor. The forms (think Kurt Vonnegut’s Harmoniums), evoke notions of the Nobel prize-winning physicist, Schrödinger, while teasing the philosophical interplay between René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, who had opposing viewpoints on the plurality of “substances,” forms, or material matter as they relate to the perception of the observer and the notion of external attributes.

With this new, almost meditative painting series, Palacios seems to be evoking the philosophy of Vladimir Solov’ëv, as seen in the 19th-century Russian writer and philosopher’s ambitious and perhaps intentionally naive, The Crisis of Western Philosophy, which Solov’ëv wrote at a brazen 21-years-old. Western Philosophy, if not through philosophical rhetoric, but art, might be ready for this interrogation once more, especially as it relates to the West’s 21st century crisis of “good faith” if not stale, 19th century notions of religious faith, as they connect to every vector and dimension of civilization. Solov’ëv’s work, published originally in 1874, in philosophy is perhaps closer to Spinoza’s more vast (pantheistic) take on the substance of things, heretical though it was perceived to be, arguing against “the West’s” prevailing positivism and for moving away from a dichotomy of “speculative” (rationalist) and “empirical” knowledge in favor of a post-philosophical inquiry that would reconcile all notions of thought in a new transcendental whole. Descartes, rather, tends to crudely diagnose and affix attributes, the permanent qualities of the substance, any substance, and render them finite. This might be a form’s position in space, its size, its configuration, the coordination of its parts, and for painting’s purposes here, its color and texture. For Spinoza, for whom there are no finite substances, the attributes are of God alone, the only infinite substance, and, infinite in number, express the “eternal essence.”

It isn’t Juan Miguel’s responsibility to unpack this further for anyone, nor would it be in his interest, to be fair. Perhaps he is asking us all to dispense with our shells entirely, or disengage with our most base and pedestrian qualifiers and embrace something less definable, less confinable. It’s better to speculate in this case, rather than milk the creator dry while searching for answers, blood mining for context, for some trace of reason. Artists can be philosophers, certainly, but they need not speak nor write. Palacios, via the medium and worthy process of painting, one in which he’s been engaged for decades now, is compelling humanity to once more reconcile our differences, from animals, from nature, from each other, as they may manifest in all their variations, if only to ameliorate this crisis, this ongoing contentious separation we endure on our earthly terrain and all under the shared embrace of the infinite.