Mami, todo esta bien. No te preocupes por mí
By Rafael Palacio Illingworth
Curated by Vreni Lenggenhager
Text by Marie DuPasquier
Opening: Tuesday, 5. 10. 2021, 5 p.m.
Exhibition: 5. 10. – 10. 10. 2021 Wednesday to Sunday, 2 – 6 p.m. or by appointment.
The mad lines of colored lists join the calculation of a fabulous and fantasized recording device; words from the threshold of consciousness run alongside the severe features of a breast tumor; indecipherable curvy writings meet the soft lines delimiting the “imaginary countries I want to travel with you”. Nostalgia, existence and insignificance, belonging, love and family, “pretty fears and ugly fears”[1]…
In a gesture which raises out of a kind of urgency, day and night, Rafael Palacio Illingworth puts his desires, wounds, successes, failures and all sorts of daily trivia on paper. This, as if to anchor his thoughts before they vanish or maybe for exactly the opposite, not to stay captive of them. Sketching appears as the preferred and an ambivalent way to process cheerful and chaotic elements of life: at once being able to remind and being able to let go. Mami, todo esta bien. No te preocupes por mí is a meditation, a call for calmness, a wish for the kind of inner peace you want to claim out loud to your mother.
Stemming from an everyday and necessary exercise, the drawings, spontaneous way out for raw emotions, are at the same time the ground for experimentation as well as the junction point of Rafael Palacio Illingworth’s various practices which are photography, painting and predominantly filmmaking. He thus constitutes a gigantic data base of lines, words and forms, a repertoire in which he can draw infinitely, to use as means to develop further projects. The corpus of sketches become a visualizer for oneself before the thoughts turn into spoken words, before they reach the public screen all the while weaving the fabric of a multi-form, transversal and multimedia work.
What started as a tool to acquire new drawing skills became an ongoing examination of one’s own positioning and surrounding. Rafael Palacio Illingworth’s drawing practice is a trial. A trial to make space for the wild inventions of the mind and non-filtered visions. A trial as a statement to push away the expectation of speed and results of the film industry. We can see here a non-linear way of dealing with motion picture, of constructing sequences and scripts that goes against the grain of the overregulated current practices of cinema to rather tend towards the experience of making. In doing so, Rafael Palacio Illingworth reclaims the joy of the process and guaranty the capacity to generate new perspectives.
“Write the first draft, only for you and just write, note to yourself, repeat...Nobody will read it, allow yourself to paint on the page with words, as if doodling”[2]. With these sentences which resonate as a mantra, Rafael Palacio Illingworth emphasizes the function of the sketches that is not primarily intended to reach an external gaze. Here, framed, exhibited in an art space they adopt a new status. In Mami, todo esta bien. No te preocupes por mí Rafael Palacio Illingworth opens both on his work process and his deep intimacy. Naked he is, and the exhibition transforms into a scribbled self-portrait, letting room for the viewers to interpret further and be confronted to their own internal tensions.
[1] Quotations from the artist’s preparation notes.
[2] Excerpt from Rafael Palacio Illingworth’s sketch.