BENJAMÃN PALENCIA (Barrax, Albacete, 1894 - Madrid, 1980).
La casita de Crespín" ("Crespín's Little House"), 1955.
Oil on canvas adhered to panel.
Signed and dated in the lower left corner.
Measurements: 97 x 130 cm, 103 x 135,5 cm.
Palencia has an intellectual look on the landscape, far from simple mimicry, affirmed in the distant view, which gives depth, and in the movement of planes. In 1931, when political times were different and his work still followed the forms of the avant-garde, Palencia wrote about landscape as the creator of the physiognomy of being.
Benjamín Palencia's way of understanding landscape in his later years reflects his habitual attitude, a mixture of avant-garde language and tradition in his choice of sites and approaches to the subject, combined with a carefree, sometimes violent, use of a liberated, fiery chromaticism. In his youth he approached surrealism to offer exceptional scenes with tortured figures with a biomorphic appearance, but in his maturity he returned to a more conventional poetics which, nevertheless, continues to run the adventure of the new in order to rediscover the Castilian landscape.
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. At the age of fifteen Palencia left his native town and settled in Madrid to develop his training through his frequent visits to the Prado Museum, as he always rejected the official teachings of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts. In 1925 he took part in the Exhibition of Iberian Artists held at the Retiro Palace in Madrid, and in 1926 he travelled to Paris for the first time. 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 and ashes. It was during this Parisian stay that Palencia's work took on a surrealist tone, evidenced by an increasingly greater expressive freedom that reached its peak in his mature period. On his return to Madrid he founded the Vallecas School (1927) and made his individual debut at the Museum of Modern Art (1928). Palencia gradually abandoned still lifes to return to the Castilian landscape, capturing it through a magnificent synthesis of tradition and the avant-garde. This personal aesthetic of landscape painting reached its culmination in the Vallecas School and, after a brilliant surrealist incursion in the early 1930s, when the Civil War broke out Palencia remained in Madrid and, like his fellow artists of his generation, suffered a period of profound crisis. When the war ended, between 1939 and 1940 his painting took a radical turn; he abandoned cubist and abstract influences and even aspects of a surrealist nature in search of an art with a strong chromatic impact, linked to Fauvism. Focusing on his work as a landscape painter, in 1942 Palencia took up again the experience of the Vallecas School together with the young painters Ãlvar Delgado, Carlos Pascual de Lara, Gregorio del Olmo, Enrique Núñez Casteló and Francisco San José. His work would include images of the Castilian countryside and its peasants and animals; his painting became a testimony to the rough, the coarse and the rural, to the subtle expressiveness of Castilian sobriety. Now fully consolidated, in 1943 he won the first medal at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts and in 1944 he was selected to take part in the Salón de los Once de Eugenio D'Ors in Madrid. The following year he was awarded the medal of honour at the National Exhibition, although he gave it up in order to facilitate its award to José Gutiérrez Solana, who died a few days before the jury's decision. From this decade onwards he exhibited his works in art centres and galleries such as the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid and the Estilo gallery, and in 1946 he was once again selected for the Salón de los