Entering Marcos Palazzi’s (Barcelona, 1965) studio is, in a way, like entering his home. This Catalan artist, whose greatest virtue is humility, turns everyday things into art. His inspiration, drawn from his emotional surroundings, fuels his mainly pictorial work that revolves around drawing, photography, memory and a sense of humour.
Everything in Marcos Palazzi’s story seems to take place in a continuous present, as if we were in a story by George Orwell where only the here and now matters. So that when I ask him how and when he met Marta, his wife: “In Puigcerdà, I suppose. Years ago. I used to go to a friend’s house and she had a house there.” His work is a way of capturing moments. Many of the paintings around us are family scenes featuring his three children, his wife and himself. “It’s harder to paint children when they’re small, it’s more difficult. I painted them several times in a large format. They all sold. It’s funny because, who wants a painting of a child?” he muses.
THE KITCHEN. Oil on wood, 2016.
MATEO. Oil on wood, 2016. Today, his studio is a hidden gem in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter, the kind where you enter through a modest courtyard and up a narrow staircase. Nothing indicates what you’ll find when you cross the threshold: large semi-arched windows, hundreds of artworks of all sizes, images, stickers, peculiar objects… “Upstairs you will find Artigau, a Pop Art artist, so to speak, who is 83 years old. He was my teacher and I’d come and visit him from time to time. One day, I asked him to let me know if his downstairs neighbour ever left because I’d like to rent the studio if I possibly could, and I’ve been here for ten years now.”
Standing at the window of his small stage of hyper-realistic artefacts, you can sense that Marcos Palazzi has lived a full life. Perhaps his secret is to not go further or not so far, or to be successful to a greater or lesser degree. Perhaps the key to happiness in his case lies in family life. A life to portray.
