VICENÇ PALMER or the joy of the celebrant.

In the middle of the road of life –just as Dante did at the beginning of the Divine Comedy–, our protagonist decides to take the decisive step, primordial, and he abandoned himself to the adventure of carving out an identity for himself in the world of art. Eventful, dangerous task that implies a great challenge. Vicenç Palmer’s existential beat (Palma, 1955) takes another pace, a high intensity and tempered frequency rhythm, when he handles the paint-brush and mixes the colours. It is never late if everyone is on time, wherever the place, whichever the task, whatever the result. Against the option of achieving the artistic path as an expiatory element, Vicenç Palmer prefers painting from a pleasant, hedonistic experimentation of the creative act. It is, therefore, a Dionysian, astonished look that shuns the torment and anguish that generally accompany the spirit of those who experience art as a sort of redemption. An impulse of fertile happiness is perceived in the work of the artist, an explosion of joy that fills the canvas. Colours gloat in a great party, a chromatic exuberance that contains a hypnotic power, an impact that recalls Kandinsky. Not in vain the imagery presents a series of flowers, suns, geometric shapes, anthropomorphic figures..., giving always an important role to the background, made of an abundant, naked colour white, which goes away from the horror void. Thus, a sort of game that consists of deciphering the message begins, as if we were in front a hieroglyph or a palimpsest that cries out for our attention. Titles such as “Conversation” or “What did we do, what do we do, what will we do?” show this will to go beyond purely artistic limits to get to the formulation of pretexts. But everyone should draw their own conclusions. Isn’t art a dialogue between the work of art and the viewer since the mists of times? As Baudelaire said: “To Each His Own Chimera”. So, even if we all watch and see the same figures, the same symbology, the work of art is perceived and interpreted in a thousand different ways. This is the value, the great treasure of art. Vicenç Palmer creates signs and symbols, marks and signals, conforming an imaginary that, at times, takes us to the unconscious, all what we carry deep inside, kept back in some nook of our mind, until a memory, a feeling, an emotion..., appears unexpectedly, as a knee-jerk reaction that comes from your soul. The metallic canvas, the iron feet and stands, the pigmented sand..., make evident the imaginative ability of the artist, who looks for complements where to embed the theoretical discourse, the expressive ideology. The meaning of Palmer ’s work, which comes from as diverse sources as abstract expressionism or figurative chromaticism, certainly resides in his quest and formal exploration.

The enjoyment is paining life.

Pere Joan Martorell. Puig de Son Picó, January 2016 

Translated from catalan: Magdalena Ramon Mir