Benjamín Palencia: renovator of Spanish painting.
Setdart dedicates for the first time a monographic auction to the artist Benjamín Palencia. Via a selection of more than thirty works, which reflect the different stages of the artist’s life , the auction provides a global and in-depth vision of the artist’s career, completing with an exhibition located at the headquarters of Setdart Madrid , calle Velázquez 7, yun video in which Ramón Palencia, a relative of the artist, brings us closer to the most personal Palencia.
The bidding for the works will take place on December 14.
Considered one of the great renovators of the poetics of the Castilian landscape , the long career of Benjamín Palencia, and his audacious and free sense of art, left us an indelible mark that revolutionized the conception of landscape painting that until now had dominated in Spain. Painter and poet from his youth , Benjamin, knew how to conquer the dawaken from a new painting, and dominate it with his ferocity, as well defined by Picasso himself . Almost self-taught, his education did not prevent him from being a man, and an artist of culture. Since his youth he was linked with writers such as, for example; Juan Ramón Jiménez, who discovered him through a still life with Larra’s portrait, exhibited at the Ateneo de Madrid (Lot: 35256518) . He also collaborated with José Bergamín in his magazine Cruz y Raya, a paradigm of contemporary Spanish, and later with Lorca en la Barraca, a theater company in which Palencia contributed all the experience gathered on his trip to Paris. His close link with literature and especially with the generation of 27 and 98 resonated in a painting (Lot: 35272365) , to which Palencia contributed great lyricality, crystallizing in his interest in landscape, a genre that he managed to raise, detaching it from the traditional dark palette, typical of 19th century Spain. The lyrical explosion of color into which he turned the landscape was only affected during the civil war in a desolate period that the artist spent alone in Madrid, and which led him to pronounce the phrase: “I keep my painting from man, in search of a nature without hatred ”.
The landscape conception of Palencia experienced multiple facets, as an indisputable creator, he founded the Vallecas school, with which Palencia managed to equate Spanish painting with international aesthetic currents. Later, he approached the constructivism of Torres García and as a consequence of the Civil War, he nostalgically resorted to a second school in Vallecas, which he ended up abandoning for a more expressively colorful painting (Lot: 35272359) . Throughout his career he aesthetically approached multiple currents and schools, of which in many cases he was a founder, but always escaping from them, in favor of a total commitment to painting and artist freedom. This artistic responsibility materialized in a creativity, which it expanded to other fields such as, for example: theater (Lot: 35147398) , ceramics (Lot: 35201071) , and everyday objects (Lot: 35201072) or found, thus raising the daily life to an aesthetic and artistic universe
This careful selection of pieces testifies without a doubt the long career of an artist committed to his time. Undisputed creator Benjamín Palencia, bequeathed us with his art a new conception of painting, which he himself defined as follows: “The main thing is to have light in the intelligence and the heart so that everything is in its place geometrically clean, saying with purity everything that has to be said plastically ”.
Related Posts
