Parallels: A note on the art of David Palacios

Félix Suazo

The creative work of David Palacios (Havana, 1967) concerns itself with the relation between the social and the artistic, as it seeks to transcend the illusion of a boundary separating these two areas. To that end, he draws a parallel between the production of material goods and the world of art, while adopting techniques from such varied fields as the media, ethnography, museum art and statistics in attempting to expose the mechanisms by which symbols are created and how they differ from reality. All this is handled with a sharp sense of satire, as well as a certain irony and humor.
From that point on, each work follows a specific strategy of its own, based on the expectations and possibilities of the context. For example, in the show Art porcentual (Sala Mendoza, Caracas, 2000) Palacios adds up and classifies in detail the different elements that comprise a work; while he refers in Zona de distensión (Sala Rómulo Gallegos, Caracas, 2003) to a large number of artists who have used bricks in their work and these are analyzed by the workers in a brick factory.
This constant movement between seemingly different areas acquires remarkable meaning in the series of projects titled … una extensión de … (Museo Alejandro Otero, Caracas, 2006), in which the artist installs local (or regional) versions of shows held by large museums abroad by way of a cultural extension. The idea is to hold “openings” in places more or less removed from those traditionally associated with high art (a hairdressing salon in Bogotá, a pet shop in Caracas, etc.) simultaneously with some big exhibition taking place in New York’s MoMA, London’s Tate Modern or the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, to only mention some of the museums. In all these cases, the artist exposes the way in which the great cultural events bring their influence to bear in an asymmetric world where the faraway places appear to be relegated to the role of consumers of foreign artistic fare.

Caracas, November 2006