Caballo (Untitled)

Alirio Palacios

Though celebrated for his figurative work, Palacios increasingly turned to abstraction during his lifetime. He conveyed the forces of nature and his inner world through bold, solid strokes: a way of channeling the power of his ancestral Delta landscape. His background in printmaking defined his practice. As Alejandro Otero noted, Palacios thought through prints first, integrating graphic techniques into painting and drawing. Like mezzotint, his figures emerged from darkness toward light. If Reverón mastered luminous atmospheres, Palacios was the king of darkness.

Palacios’s education spanned the Delta, Caracas, China, Poland, Switzerland, and New York. He began drawing as a child in San Tomé, then studied in Caracas with Otero, Fabbiani, and Gerd Leufert, who taught him the “three-dimensionality of color.” Rejecting academic routine in Rome, he went to China in 1961. At Peking’s University of Fine Arts he studied woodcut with Li Hua, learning harmony between self and nature. Chinese teaching, summed up in the phrase “give me color, give me black,” shaped his spiritual use of black and his rejection of Western anxiety for constant change.

After China, Warsaw and Krakow deepened his command of mezzotint and poster design. Returning to Caracas in 1975, he worked with the Consejo Nacional de Cultura while exhibiting widely. Marta Traba described his “powerful, oniric climate”: paintings of atmosphere and suspended time, more vision than reality. The Delta never left him. At his Carrizales studio he made “concretegraphs,” printing from carved slabs of reinforced concrete, alongside large woodcuts using Chinese pigments.

From 1985 on, Palacios split time between Caracas and New York. A SoHo studio brought international reach and access to Chinese materials in Chinatown. He printed on wooden planks, then altered each piece individually. He revisited Lin Ku Lin’s 600-year-old horse, tracing it with a nail on wood, and depicted the Orinoco’s myths: manatees, serpents, ancestral spirits. The Delta was not tranquil but aggressive and transforming. “The experiences of this world cannot be said without the color black.”

Palacios experimented constantly. He created large digital prints through repeated scans, reworking Vermeer, Goya, and medieval figures while preserving wood-grain texture. His later work grew more synthetic and abstract, defined by planes of color and forceful gestures. Yet his mythic universe, with ghosts, animals, rain, and trees, remained universal. Travel gave him discipline and technique. The Delta remained his origin, not just as place, but as a condition of his being.