Fairs

Liste Art Fair Basel
​2024
​
Victoria Palacios
Behind the curtain,
the swans will always be two,
melting like butter
into the night

Booth 7
​
Dates_ June 10–16, 2023
Venue_ Messe Basel, Hall 1.1
​

Installation Views / Works / Press Release

Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present solo project: Behind the curtain, the swans will always be two, melting like butter into the night, by Brussels based, cross-disciplinary artist Victoria Palacios for Liste Art Fair Basel 2024 at Stand 7. Embodying the theme of theatrical play within her practice, the overall space is transformed into an immersive performance stage, with a striking centerpiece composed of a dismantled jazz drum kit atop a hand painted checkered floor. The show also features the artist’s latest body of paintings on canvas and books across the walls, each recounting her idiosyncratic repertoire of clowns, acrobats, animals and folkloric characters. Like the score of a play, the fusion of fiction and history, memory and immediacy, illustrated characters and stage props, installation and set design, all come to set the stage, awaiting command from a hidden director.

Alluding to the pair of swans from her show’s title, Palacios poses a poetic dialogue about the notion of the duet, a simple structure that draws out a state of ambiguity—to be at the center of everything and the middle of nothing. She turns particularly to the clown, not only inspired by her personal familiarity with it since her father wears the red nose, but also much acquainted with her own imaginative identification with such type. As a symbolic figure who, throughout cultural history, held a special privilege of freedom in subverting order and definition, Palacios, too, sees clowning and play as a refusal of certitude in her work. Much like the free verse mannerism of her show’s title and her multifaceted practice, both of which escape boundaries and solid interpretations, Palacios persists in seeking deliberate irregularities, keeping her medium open to indicate the totality of her artistic expression.

The show begins with the drum kit installation located at the center of the booth, which serves as the grounding piece to the notion of theatricality in Palacios’ artistic practice as well as an instrument of her profession as a musician. Paired with her surreally painted monochromatic checkered floor, she transports her viewers into an illusive cycle between the real world and a fictitious stage set, the spectator and the performer. While the presence of the musical instrument logs a role of work and play in everyday life and the nature of choreography, it simultaneously appeals to Palacios’ illustrated world of fictional performers: the trumpeter in Blue butter (2024), and the bagpipe playing rabbit in My bagpipe! Brushing drawings on jam, rabbit (2023). The drum surfaces are nourished in wavy lines and creamy impastos to dub them the same jocose atmosphere as in her paintings.

As much as Palacios can create a world turned upside down and inside out, so can the reverse be done. Her swans are the witness of such transition from joviality to sadness. Seen in her largest painting of the series, In In red butter they embrace (2024), the pair of white-feathered animals arched into each other’s embrace and weeped in hiding. In other works such as Black Swan (2024), one sees a resemblance of the artist’s vigorous attempts to rework the creatures with impastoed acrylics and frenzied strokes as a hand that tries to soothe, yet inevitably exhausting these pristine animals into a puddle of melted chaos. In Scène 5 (2024) and Scène 6 (2024), the gaucho figure enters, observing the birds coyly behind the curtains, just like the viewer, waiting for the characters to reveal their undefended true self.

From ridicule to joy, and joy that melts back into sorrow, Palacios’ work balances on the edge of euphoria and melancholy. To clown is, in another sense, to think in a serious way. They are works of profound clowning, where an incantation of subtle details can only be appreciated with focused attention.

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