There was a plan…and then there wasn’t

There is perhaps no gesture as human as that of wanting to anticipate events. Interpreting our experiences, transforming them into a system that allows us to create a model to foresee the future, even in the slightest, becomes a futile but persistent gesture and an unconscious attitude of our everyday life.We can’t be surprised, then, by the emergence of the notion of destiny, historically and culturally represented as that which is inevitable, which by its very nature escapes our control and justifies the failure of our attempts to avoid or modify it.With that said, what arises from this uncertainty? What tools can we use to bring these ideas to the surface without succumbing to their immensity? What is the point of planning, in this context?

Faced with these questions, Palmieri responds through experimentation. His natural tendency towards assemblage work, in combination with minimally intervened materials, invents new forms that question the need for a definitive creation or a single answer.The new forms that arise invite the viewer to fill the open spaces by their complexity; wood, aluminum, fabrics, steel, all these materials in their individuality activate a sort of haptic memory, and as a whole generate new ones, as powerful as inevitable in their potentiality.

From the apparent fragility of strands of thread to the firmness of fabric, the creation of a whole from fragments whether materials or colors, become a conductor at the center of Palmieri’s proposal. In the artist's hands, the interweaving of these materialities resembles an invisible thread that holds them together, even if only temporarily.This gives rise to malleable structures that, without losing resistance, confront the reality of planning in the face of the uncertainty of the future.The textile elements, part of a personal history, lay the foundations of experience through memory, structural elements used by the artist when attempting to plan ahead.

By accepting the existence of destiny, the act of planning becomes a practice that is as important as it is incidental, as transcendental as it is insignificant. If the path of human experience is a constant series of questions without definitive answers and answers without questions to anchor them, destiny is as open-ended as we want it to be, as solid or ephemeral as we need it to be.There is always a plan, even when there is none.

Text by Santiago López