By: Susana Quintero Borowiak.

Hugo Palmar is a young contemporary artist whose work, in regard to the medium, ranges from bidimensional representations to installations, and, in regard to his discourse, from the intimate realm to the collective expression. This versatility comes from his conviction that every action in the creative process is a constitutive and an essential part of both the work and life, since to him there is no clear-cut separation between the vital process and the artistic outcome.

Drawings and installations are not consecutive steps, but elements that mesh and feed each other. Although the drawings constitute the most basic aspect of his work, they do not serve, in principle, as sketches or projects, but are instead the channel for the material expression of a series of intimate conjectures, that appear on paper through the linkage of tiny and elaborate images. What we could call (in a daring literary expression) reflexive drawings present, formally, extensive fields of color upon which a closed weave of figures is juxtaposed. It is a minute drawing, linear, flat, or with hints at a perspective, in which a number of characters, scenes and environments of industrial ancestry appear.

The installations are the tridimensional manifestation of some insistently drawn scenes in these material exercises of thought. There is no specific point in which an image takes precedence over the others. Palmar states that all of his drawings could be understood as future installations; but as soon as he decides that a particular environment is to be materialized, he undertakes a new drawing process in which there is now a real intention of projecting strongly theatrical stages. Each step of the process, from the drawings, the sketches, and the montage to the installation are part of a whole that can be understood both as a whole or through its individual elements.

Furthermore, each work gathers subjective evocations of lived situations, memories symbolically recreated, through which the artist addresses his nightmares, traumas, and fears to free himself from them, but also to show that his personal experience is a concrete symptom of social events. I am could also be You are or We are, all of us, part of a system that coerces us and overwhelms us. Palmar seeks to show that the power system is structured through institutions in charge of establishing the order and transmitting the patterns of behavior that homogenize individual
actions in favor of collective organization, always prone to obedience.

Only the individual can be reflective, and that is the warning at stake in this exhibit. Each person is unavoidably subjected to external forces that shape her/his life and over which s/he has no control (and of which sometimes s/he is not even conscious). But additionally, certain institutions try to dissolve the spaces of intimacy, as a tool to replace individual conscience with a collective conformation that obeys, with ease and force, to the survival needs of the power structures. This is not the result of an intrinsically perverse praxis; it is the normal behavior of a contemporary social and institutional construct. Palmar just feeds off his memories to point out to us what is going on, in keeping with his thesis on the proximity of art and life.


Maracaibo, Jullio 2006