Un Final Feliz, by Kurt McVey

Translated into English as A Happy Ending, Palacios is hoping to largely dispense with the phrase’s somewhat taboo East-meets-West connotation, while holding onto the alliterative music and poetry, as it flows in Español. This doesn’t mean Palacios is completely earnest of course. The pig, largely absent from celebrated modern and contemporary painting, save for the works of artists largely on the outside of the institutional cannon’s jurisdiction, stands in deliberate contrast with what an aesthete might correlate with all the tells of “fine or high art.”

The pig, the literal animal, despite cocktail musings regarding its considerable intelligence and genetic similarities to other mammals, including we advanced primates, is still largely dismissed as a filthy, underdeveloped brute. Metaphorically, bad-apple cops, chauvinists, gluttons, these are all linked, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, to the porcine barnyard staple.

In under an hour, sitting in Palacios’ studio in the 56 Bogart gallery complex in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the pig, sometimes caught somewhat shamelessly and other times embarrassingly mid-coitus, emerges as a valid subject and symbol for a sensitive Spaniard’s view of gross American sin. Regardless of one’s opinion on the arrival and efficacy of vaccines, any reasonably intelligent adult must come to terms with humanity’s global foray into H. sapiens pharmaceutical factory farming. Un Final Feliz, which mocks the notion of a “post-COVID” world, or even the potential for some sort of heroic light at the end of the late, late-capitalism spiral into physical and moral degradation, in a way, implicates and imprisons us all.

Pigs, or swine as they’re often referred to in the preclinical toxicological testing of pharmaceuticals, like many animals, beyond their own mistreatment in mass-meat factory slaughterhouses around the country, leading to undue suffering and adverse environmental impacts, are also heavily used in vaccine research. Oxford University teamed up with the Pirbright Institute for instance, to test the efficacy of their own COVID-19 jab and follow-up boosters. What might be alluded to here, is that we, the end consumer, the means to an end, are not so far removed from the inhumane “flesh is money” complex still propped up in the West. But as we were told, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, down, down.

So yes, Juan Miquel Palacios wanted to do something controversial and in its own way, political. But he also wanted to do something happy, something fresh, something totally different. If Palacios wanted to be quoted for this writing, he might tell you he was “super-tired” of painting “the faces;” that he was tired of doing the same thing, of the demands for beautiful faces and beautiful girls, and that he doesn't recognize himself in those pieces any longer.

For those of us who very much appreciate Palacios’ past work, like the hyena paintings, which spoke to and implicated the many “abusers” through similar anthropomorphic metaphor and

correlated somewhat serendipitously with the larger #metoo movement, the pig paintings are a natural extension of this theme. Ditto the aforementioned “face” paintings, for which the artist has become primarily known. These involve paintings on intentionally excavated sheetrock, exposing the inner mesh lattice and crumbling detritus, while inner and sometimes outer painted layers, sometimes rendered on Plexiglass, feature partially obscured beauties, mostly women, either hiding or caught in a state of being hidden. This process activates the otherwise two-dimensional picturplane and transforms the “war-torn” art object, the painting as most know it, into something more sculptural, tangible and emotive. Beautiful but heavy.

Until the advent of the pigs, the artist has been painting (and constructing/deconstructing) dystopian landscapes, often urban in nature, perhaps an existential journey through the depressive state of cities during quarantine; devoid of humanity; even of ghosts. Artists, painters especially, can easily lock into a shtick or language or general aesthetic. It becomes their calling card and to some degree, this is essential to becoming and remaining a relevant and recognizable artist. Juan Miguel Palacios has not entirely dispensed with some of his more wild strokes, forming a tempestuous but colorful storm of abstract gestures. New here is the use of pinks, correlated to the pig of course, but there is something else happening with this color, a sort of “Starburst Pink” as opposed to the now uncool “Millenium Pink,” popular with West Coast influencers pre-pandemic, when dreams were locked up and deferred.

Recent paintings by the Austrian avant-garde artist, Hermann Nitsch, feature this unique pink surrounded by broad, sausage-finger hand smears of yellows and oranges. This pink, for Nitsch, is remarkable in that it stands in contrast to his earlier works featuring harsh, dripping, saturated blood-reds and earthy, almost fecal browns. This new, lighter pink has been reclaimed here by men, perhaps once plagued by a compulsion to exude masculinity in semiotic terms. Cecily Brown’s Fall, 2020 show at Paula Cooper, on the other hand, looked like old Nitsch, with swirling browns, reds and flesh tones spinning and intertwining violently.

It’s prevalent now, in common discourse, that humans have removed themselves from nature. We are both at the top of and completely removed from the food chain, and to potentially catastrophic effect. Our ongoing recognition of seemingly lower life forms as sentient, animals like lobsters, crabs and octopuses, creatures set to be included in the United Kingdom’s upcoming Animal Welfare (Sentience) Bill, is a way to reinsert ourselves into “nature” more broadly as a creature less of disruption, but of balance and equilibrium. In recognizing that sentience as humans may define it exists across the animal kingdom, we must in turn reflect on our own value set, and how sentience does not insulate higher life forms from committing horrors that more than likely baffle these same creatures who we believe stand apart from us.

Un Final Feliz attempts to address but not reconcile harsh binaries, like a Spaniard’s love for the United States and all the possibilities wrapped up in the idea of the American Dream, while wading through the last two years, which at times felt considerably more like a strange and seemingly endless nightmare of desolation, loneliness, isolation, fear and paranoia. Amidst the political blowhards, pundits and misinformation, a sense of optimism and solidarity endures, capitalism rolls on, the debt ceiling gets pushed back, and a smile yet emmerges.