Untitled

Technique

Ink on paper

Dimensions

Paper size: 48 x 31 cm
Frame size: 84 x 67,5 x 4 cm

Inventory

FM000165

Description

In November and December of 1933, Benjamín Palencia held a solo exhibition in Paris at Galerie Pierre where he presented a series of prehistoric shapes, fossils and bullfighting scenes which were admired by Picasso and some other members of the surrealist group. As Eugenio Carmona has pointed out, it is the mark of Picasso above all that we recognize in these pieces; the influence of the «geological characters» made by the Malaga artist in Dinard and his work in the Boisgeloup in 1932.

Between 1933 and 1934, Palencia began a series of drawings and watercolors —−as well as some oil paintings−— focused on the female nude, almost always groups of women standing or lying down. As in the prehistoric and fossil forms, in this new series we also witness a process of fragmentation and «reassembly» of the human figure, although with substantially different means and results. In Seated figure, the anatomy seems transformed into a collection of individual pieces: the head and its conical pedestal, the torso like a painter’s palette with two tiny spherical breasts, the arms like long-necked vases. Just as in the fossil series, the sculptural reproduction of the volume dominated in this piece, as it did in others of the same new series from 1934, the figure articulating in superimposed flat shapes as if they were transparent, with parallel lines. And if in the series of prehistoric forms the color spectrum tended towards earthy tones, browns and ochers, now the artist introduces areas of bright colors such as red and yellow. Now Miró’s characters have evidently been added to Picasso’s influence.

In its frontal and symmetrical posture, with arms raised and legs spread, this female figure could call to mind a sex goddess in the style of the Babylonian Ishtar, of terrible majesty, as told by the Medusan head of frizzy hair. But, at the same time, the supposed idol is only a doll, an articulated marionette, which would be controlled by operating invisible strings.

[Guillermo Solana]