Observing the past inevitably means recreating it, in a gesture of constant resignification. In turn, filling the gaps between our personal history and History is an exercise that demands that we approach both with care and, above all, a willingness to face our discoveries with honesty. Beyond simply looking for connections between objects, materials, experiences and memories, it is about inhabiting a creative process that overcomes these connections, generating new spaces between them.

From this perspective, Palmieri positions himself as a sensitive researcher, working from the personal to the universal and complexifying the fragile relationships between its parts. Always mobile, these different material markers of history crystallize in an invitation to question the space we occupy in it, in a present that continually seems to encourage us to erase the traces of what was, in pursuit of an increasingly uncertain future. The materialization of this exercise is given in the use of the cherub, originally taken from the work of the Flemish sculptor Francois Duquesnoy. Being an object at once as personal to the artist as it is potentially recognizable to the public, it constitutes a clear reference to a conception of artistic practice and aesthetics that we may feel more or less distant, more or less personal. Palmieri, taking advantage of this, takes this sculpture and places it at the center of his work, transforming it and integrating it into his pieces.

On the other hand, the presence of wood, aluminum, foam rubber, and other simple materials turn the figure of the plaster angel, so clearly distinguishable in each of its details -even when Palmieri's intervention deforms or hides parts of its face, we can recognize it- into an anchor, pulling at the relationship between the parts that make up each piece. The union between them refers to the inevitability of how, with the passage of time, these contemporary objects and these "antique" objects manage to coexist in the same piece. The temporal difference between one and the other is destined to disappear, leaving both simply in the past. By understanding these components on the same level, not only do they become one and the same work of art, or three-dimensional sculpture, or assemblage. Above all, this leveling of their temporalities creates something eminently new.

While we cannot guess Duquesnoy's original intention, beyond perhaps religious adoration, we can find something new in Palmieri's process of constant experimentation and affective reconstruction. Within the gesture of not only being, but becoming part of history, we find the opportunity to re-discover ourselves as pieces of an infinitely greater whole. While this may not lead us to an answer, it can be understood as an invitation to reinvent history from our perception, in a sensitive game that gives rise to one of the infinite possibilities of the after.

By : Santiago Lopez