Pablo Palazuelo

(1916 – 2007)

Palazuelo’s work represents the upper limit of Planque’s involvement with abstract art. There isn’t a trace of subjectivity in the Spanish painter’s canvases – nothing like the seduction of materials in Antoni Tapiès’ work, the superbly traced gestures of Hantaï or De Staël, the suggestiveness of Raoul Ubac or Manessier’s forms. Here geometrical shapes and color are reduced to their simplest expression. It is as such that they have the power to transform, that the meanings they impart are the visual translation of energies rather than rational explanations or idealist yearnings. They seem to emerge from the beginning of time, palpable signs that bring to mind, and contain, all signs, whether legible or not. In front of Palazuelo’s beautiful, austere works Planque, one imagines, must have been struck by their affinity with Cézanne’s quest for an architecture of presence and with the spiritual harmonies in another of Palazuelo’s frequent topics of reflection: the art of Paul Klee.