Blinky Palermo

Peter Heisterkamp, AKA Blinky Palermo, is, perhaps, the artist who best summarizes the contemporary history of painting as a constant expansion of what is pictorial as well as an impulse to reunite reality with drawing, tracing, and color. His work distances itself from the systematic negation of painting as an easy way out of contemporary Art’s representative crisis. His ‘objects’, as Palermo decided to call his paintings, are an explicit attempt at pictorial illusionism, and an apostasy of the framing and the separation between background, foreground, and wall as ‘layers’ upon which paint acquires both plastic and artistic dimension. The exhibition catalogue includes paintings dating back to 1964 until his sudden death at age 34. It includes drawings and studies which the artist used to plan his installations and murals, which was the case for his work Himmelsrichtungen, done in 1976 for the XXXVII Venice Bienal, which was reconstructed for the exhibition at the MACBA. The publication also includes essays by Gloria Moure, Anne Rorimer, and Ángel Gonzélez.