Jose Palacios – We can start over again

First solo exhibition of Jose Palacios

From Thursday, May 12 to Thursday, June 23

Bio:

Jose Palacios (b. 1978, Lima, Peru) is a visual artist, musician, and DJ who works and lives in Ottawa, Ontario.  His paintings, which include both digital works and those on canvas and paper, have been shown in exhibitions at Galerie Annexe at the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Ottawa City Hall Art Gallery.

Description:

Alliance Française is pleased to present We Can Start Over Again, the first solo exhibition of Ottawa-based artist Jose Palacios.  This selection of paintings showcases the stylistic breadth of his intuitive, experimental and process-based approach to visual art, leading to unexpected interplays of colour, line and space that invite the viewer to see anew.  The exhibition opens on May 12, 2022 at Alliance Française Ottawa with a reception attended by the artist.

Informed by his experiences as a musician and DJ, Palacios approaches painting in a way that is similar to how ideas come together when he makes music:  layering and sampling ideas, looping phrases and repeating patterns until all the different parts reveal a finished whole.  Palacios uses a variety of media – acrylic, oil sticks, watercolour, and spray paint – to enrich, layer, and interrupt surfaces with multiple textures, creating curious contrasts and tensions within a single work.

Where locatedness is loosened through a playful tension of differently weighted focal points – as in Analogous, where the fluid verticality of intentionally-placed lines contrast with heavier, constrained blocks – the paintings seem to contain circuits of energy that follow a complex internal logic.  Other works, like In Your First House and In Praise of Melancholy, draw upon electric and calming colour palettes to channel a spontaneous and uncontainable force driven by an intuitive impulse that leaps off the canvas. When Palacios’ works include figurative elements, as in Death of a Party, they tend to emerge in a dream-like way, entangled with bursts of colour, textures, and layers.

Enlivening and ecovative, the paintings in We Can Start Over Again are a delight for the eyes, rousing curiosity and offering the possibility to look again at what and how we see.  They evidence a raw vibrancy at the root of Palacios’ creative momentum that continues to propel his work forward in new and exciting directions.

Jose Palacios acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, City of Ottawa and Digital Originals.