Openhouse magazine, ISSUE 20Inma BuendiaEnglish

MARCOS PALAZZI

Openhouse magazine, ISSUE 20Inma BuendiaEnglish
MARCOS PALAZZI

PORTRAITS OF LIFE

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.

We meet his daughter Lucía in what seems like an almost Costumbrist scene like those depicted in Palazzi’s work, and, amid laughter, memories and anecdotes, she reveals her father’s career and personality whenever he plays down some of his achievements.

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. “When we went to exhibitions,” Lucía explains, “my brothers and I counted how many times we were in the paintings to see who would win. One day at the beach,” she continues, “a boy who was playing with us said that my brother looked very familiar. Suddenly it dawned on him that there was a painting in his home of my brother Simon pulling at a tooth. Of course, someone has a child and someone has Simon. Someone has me or someone has my mother, my cats or my dad. People buy us, yes.”

While Fabián and Lucía arrange the space to shoot the portraits, I do the same with words, trying to find out if an artist is born or made. “I’ve always drawn, ever since I was a little boy. I also like comics a lot. Even then I was very inspired by the underground comic artist Robert Crumb and all his work. The comic Dossier Negro was more about horror stories, but it had very good cartoonists, almost all of them Americans,” explains Marcos.

It was the 1970s in Barcelona, a time when it wasn’t easy to find these comics. “My uncle would buy them all. Although he was a doctor, he was very fond of comics. He’d let me go into his room and read some of them, but just a few. Later, I’d borrow Will Eisner's much-loved comic The Spirit from a newsagent’s. The girl who ran it let me, and she was more discreet about it than I was.” Marcos says that he partly credits his profession to an accident he had shortly before taking his university entrance exams. “I was in a coma for seven days after the accident, I didn’t study at all and I failed. Instead of doing Fine Arts, I enrolled at EINA (Centro Universitario de Diseño y Arte de Barcelona) because I was advised to by the designer América Sánchez. He taught there. Shortly afterwards I got into the Massana school and the Llotja, which I also used as a studio.” Soon after, Marcos won a competition organised by the Parés Gallery in Barcelona (where he continues to exhibit) and art became his livelihood.

Art is not only Marcos’s profession but also the place to which he belongs, the community in which he has been immersed since he started out. “When I was 22 or 23 years old, we had a group called San Paulino. It was the name of the street where we had the studio, an abandoned school in the upper part of Barcelona that they let me use. We thought of having an exhibition to avoid the galleries. It lasted a day and was a lot of fun. We sold quite a lot. We did it every year.”

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.” Lucía acts as our guide: “Mateo here doesn’t look like Mateo,” she says, pointing to a painting of her brother. “And that is the farewell to my dog in the kitchen, when we had to have him put him down,” she explains, while standing next to another of the paintings that, like a photo album, amass milestones from her own life.