Benjamin Palencia

BENJAMÍN PALENCIA (Barrax, Albacete, 1894 - Madrid, 1980).
Untitled, 1948.
Gouache on paper glued to cardboard.
Attached certificate of authenticity issued by the Benjamín Palencia Archive.
It has damage on the edges.
Signed and dated in the upper left corner.
Measurements: 48,5 x 34 cm.
This painting by Benjamín Palencia, made in 1948, shows a portrait of stylized profile and expressive appearance, painted with a palette of vibrant and contrasting colors. The composition is notable for its bold use of thick lines and dark contours that define the face, hands and hair of the sitter. The character appears with his hand near his mouth in a position that suggests reflection or perhaps an interrupted action.
The technique used, which combines flat areas of color with visible brushstrokes and marked contours, gives the character an air between expressionist and cubist. The tones used are mainly warm (yellows, pinks, reds) that contrast with the background divided into two solid colors: green on the left and blue on the right. This two-color background highlights the figure and brings dynamism to the work. The piece shows a bold and experimental style, characteristic of Palencia, exploring the psychology and character of the subject through abstract shapes and colors.

Founder of the Vallecas School together with sculptor Alberto Sánchez, Benjamín Palencia was one of the most important heirs of the poetics of the Castilian landscape characteristic of the Generation of '98. When he was only fifteen years old, Palencia left his hometown and settled in Madrid to develop his training through his frequent visits to the Prado Museum, since he always rejected the official teachings of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando. In 1925 he participates in the Exhibition of Iberian Artists held at the Retiro Palace in Madrid, and in 1926 he travels for the first time to Paris. There he met Picasso, Gargallo and Miró and came into contact with the collage technique, which he would later apply to his work, incorporating new materials such as sand or ashes. It will be from this Parisian stay when Palencia's work acquires a surrealist tone, evidenced in an increasingly greater expressive freedom that will reach its fullness in his period of maturity. On his return to Madrid he founded the Vallecas School (1927), and made his individual debut at the Museum of Modern Art (1928). Palencia will gradually abandon still lifes to take up again the Castilian landscape, capturing it through a magnificent synthesis between tradition and avant-garde. This personal aesthetic of the landscape will reach its culmination in the School of Vallecas and, after a brilliant surrealist incursion in the early thirties, when the Civil War broke out Palencia remained in Madrid, suffering a period of deep crisis like his generation mates. After the war, between 1939 and 1940 his painting took a radical turn; he abandoned the cubist and abstract influences and even the surrealist aspects, in search of an art of strong chromatic impact, linked to Fauvism. Focused on his work as a landscape painter, in 1942 Palencia takes up again the experience of the Vallecas School together with the young painters Álvar Delgado, Carlos Pascual de Lara, Gregorio del Olmo, Enrique Núñez Casteló and Francisco San José. His work will collect images of the Castilian countryside and its peasants and animals; his painting becomes a testimony of the rough, the coarse and the rural, of the subtle expressiveness of the Castilian sobriety. Already fully consolidated, in 1943 he obtained the first medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and in 1944 he was selected to participate in the Salón de los Once de Eugenio D'Ors in Madrid. The following year he was awarded the medal of honor at the National Exhibition, although he renounced it to facilitate its concession to José Gutiérrez Solana.