Ana Patricia Palacios, who lives in Paris, recently presented an exhibition of her pictorial work at the Diners Gallery.
The work is interesting for a number of reasons, including the way in which the artist proposes a serious recovery of everyday elements that may, to many people, appear trivial and unimportant. This time, Palacios takes an ordinary object like a flower pot and uses this to express her deepest feelings about the world and the things that surround her. The image is repeated obsessively with certain variations that evoke elements of every day but also acquire the meaning of ritual —as in dances where certain movements are constantly repeated to bring about changes in the state of consciousness.
Palacios' art embodies a serious conception of time and space. The journey through memory is a definitive response to the questions the artist raises and also sublimates, to a certain extent, with her brush and pencil.
Memory as a source of artistic creation appears in various stages here in Palacios' attempt to find an appropriate means of drawing close to the universe and appropriating it—the recurring flower pot is placed before maps that locate it within a geographical context.
Still-life, utilized so often throughout the history of art, acquires a special meaning and significance in Palacios’ work. The mastery of the worked technique, such as drawing and painting, is made even richer by the use of other materials like wax, creating interesting transparencies and textures which refer back to the artist’s main themes. The work-which is an invitation to enjoy the pleasures of touch, and above all, of things that are clean and simple. Although they sometimes appear devoid of interest and mundane, they contain within themselves an enormous richness at the expressive and creative levels. Although the work of Ana Patricia Palacios is interesting in and of itself, it is complemented and definitively enriched by its theoretical framework.
MARCELA MEDINA