Sans titre (Untitled)

Pablo Palazuelo is one of the leading exponents of geometric abstraction, a language that he pioneered from the early 1950s when standardised repetition became an integral part of his work. He saw geometry as his work’s core, at a time when such tendencies were overshadowed by trends towards late Surrealism and Informalism. The starting point for Palazuelo’s compositions was a process of manipulation to create metamorphoses that produced groups of forms, and he saw himself simply as a “collaborator” in the appearance of these interrelated elements. His production is rooted in observation of nature; from that point, his work structures itself around series, which themselves evolve towards compositions of increasing complexity and subtlety, subject to constant study and reformulation. Palazuelo’s investigations gave rise to a whole new set of rules because of their extreme compositional exactness. Their apparent simplicity of form actually expressed a geometrical code that revealed a complex thought process and created dialogue on traditional aspects of the art profession, such as observing surroundings, through the tool of a new geometric language that reformulated reality using different coordinates to those used in the utopian projects of the historical avant-gardes.