Luis González Palma
Exilio

Luis González Palma - Exilio

Contemporary artist Luis González Palma pushes the limits of visual practice, making work that feels more a study of the nature of existence than representation. While this has always been an underpinning of the artist’s work, it is undeniable in the Exilio series.

Luis González Palma’s hybridized Exilio works feel like scratches for truth, glimpses of reality that suggest existence through the evidence of the mark. Photography, drawing, and collage naturally integrate. These works are beautiful and illusive, mysterious and strange yet surprisingly grounded. In Exilio Luis González Palma draws on methods and tendencies that have always been present in his practice, yet never with such openness and resolve. Luis González Palma has always had “the desire to ‘affect’ his photographic work with the presence of his body.” Indeed, tracing back through is oeuvre we see González Palma’s work has always shown evidence of his own hand. Through the years he has employed imperfection, layering, veils, collage, painting, drawing, even stitching to address this desire to leave visible marks of his hand and time on the work. This is expressed through such things as visible brushstrokes in his “hand-painted” silver prints, tearing of paper in his collage works, stitching that binds layers, or a rogue fingerprint in the margin of a work.

In Exilio motivations of desire are both impetus and expression. Materials become descriptive means and method in hands that through mark grasps for reality, knowing that only incompleteness could translate. This endeavor is proved by Luis González Palma’s Exilio to be a constant reaching. Only a fragment could speak to the ever-shifting nature of the present. Existence can be proved only through pieces of representation and the continual struggle to pull cognition down out of the mind and into the world. These little visual descriptions become the evidence of more than the existence of artist, subject, and viewer, but also proof of emotions- fear, doubt, uncertainty. We feel this through the interdisciplinary strategies that admit an insufficiency in singular translation, or acknowledge tentatively expressed through lines drawn, erased, and redrawn. This not that, almost, sort-of like so… We feel the struggle of the maker as gestures of a hand that seeks to do more than imagine, but foresee.

Luis González Palma - Exilio

Exilio 13 (en la Fototeca), 2018
Exilio 16 (en la Fototeca), 2018

Exilio by Luis González Palma | Price Structure:
70 x 100 cm (27.5 x 39.4 in. approx) collage with photography on onion paper and pencil drawing
Unique | $7,000