By: Víctor Fuenmayor Ruíz

What Hugo Palmar says in I am reveals several readings there, where the “I”, the first person’s pronoun, finds –with the photographic display of the artist’s own naked body–a way of inhabiting, purely and autobiographically, installations, drawings and projections. Symbolic reconstruction, imaginary reflection of what has been experienced silently in pain, finds in art, in the power of expressing it, a liberating joy. The exhibit gathers the artist’s attempt at placing himself in the scene and installing, at the same time, the spectator in a symbolic space of barrack’s confinement.

These concentration camp-like scenes project intimate actions before the eyes of the spectator, just like they develop in that conjured-up, other world, where even the objects of intimate spaces (bedrooms, bathrooms, bunk-beds, lockers, showers) line up as an addition or a multiplication, abstracting from them every singular trace, as in a subtraction of their differences. The strokes of those objects will appear, in different translations of lines and colors, in order to make them singular in hybrid works, between drawing and painting; moving images of bodies in the projections enliven a sort of naked humanity in mitigating uniformity there where a single skin rests without the uniform. To further sensitize the spectator, the installations add the necessary third dimension to make even more real the imaginary of the physical and artistic reconstruction of sites.

These spaces, in which it is said I am without being, take life to its tense extreme border between uniformity and singularity, where we can add the aesthetic sense of tensions every contemporary artist feels between the institutionalized singularity of the arts and so many things that blur diversity with a uniform vision of life. Adopting the autobiographical form, Hugo Palmar opens up the reflection that dyes his work with a tragic and social conversion, when ideology, education, politics or religion project its
threat into the future. Art exorcizes the threat of the past addressed to the future: I AM has its origin in my past and my work is a way of exorcizing the future.


Maracaibo July 2006.