BENJAMÍN PALENCIA (Barrax, Albacete, 1894 - Madrid, 1980).

BENJAMÍN PALENCIA (Barrax, Albacete, 1894 - Madrid, 1980). "Two surrealist figures", 1948. Mixed media on cardboard. Attached certificate issued by the Benjamín Palencia Archive. Signed and dated in the lower right corner. Size: 48 x 34 cm; 71 x 56 cm (frame). Two characters star in this scene of emphatic lines and completely defined color fields. Making use of the anatomical partitions so common in surrealist aesthetics, and with an unquestionable cubist reminiscence, Palencia creates this work of great expressiveness, where the central characters capture the viewer's attention by their ambiguity, and by their preponderant presence on the neutral background, and synthetically divided. The last shot is reminiscent in its conception and tonality of the work that belongs to the collection of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, "Mujer tumbada" (Lying Woman), painted by the artist in the same year (1948). Founder of the School of Vallecas together with Alberto Sánchez, sculptor, Benjamín Palencia was one of the most important heirs of the poetics of the Castilian landscape typical 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 later applied 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, at the outbreak of the Civil War Palencia remains in Madrid, suffering like his peers of his generation a period of deep crisis. 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 took 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 gather 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 obtains the first medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and in 1944 he is 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.