Benjamín Palencia played a key role in the renewal of the arts in Spain in the 1920s and 30s, and he was also an important figure in Spanish postwar art.

Born in a rural setting, at age 15 he moved to Madrid as the protégé of Rafael López Egóñez, who introduced him to the leading art and literary circles of that splendid period known as the Spanish Silver Age.

At the exhibition of the Society of Iberian Artists in 1925, Palencia unveiled a work which evidenced his affinity with the new figuration movements that dominated the international modern art world at the time. In the years that followed he made several trips to Paris, after which he adopted the lyrical figuration cultivated by some of the young Spanish artists residing in the French capital.

In the early 1930s, Palencia and the sculptor Alberto became the leaders of what we now know as the Vallecas School. Their poetic strolls through the countryside around Madrid in search of inspiration were shared and imitated by the most important artists and poetics of the renewal movement. The paintings and drawings made by Palencia during that period reflect the identifying essence of landscapes capable of intertwining the telluric and the rural. But they also contain references to suburban landscapes littered with waste and bones or the schematic manifestations of Spanish prehistoric art. Somewhere around the middle of 1932, his relationship with Alberto became strained.

In 1933 Palencia joined the Group of Artists of Constructive Art, organised by the Uruguayan Torres García upon his return to Paris. In those years his art incorporated elements verging on geometric abstraction and the visual vocabulary of Surrealism, as well as abundant allusions to Picassian plasticity.

These influences informed the Dibujo surrealista [Surrealist Drawing] in the Banco Santander Collection, which offers glimpses of prehistoric linearity, Surrealist automatic drawing and obvious nods to Picasso and Miró.

Around 1935 he also produced interesting photo collages of patently Surrealist heritage. And, as the Spanish Civil War loomed nearer, he embraced a realism halfway between rural naïveté and modern figurations with a degree of metaphysical inspiration.

In the early postwar years he reorganised another Vallecas experience with several artists from the new generation. However, Palencia was careful to conceal from them any hint of the Vallecas School from the former Republican era. His works from this time continued to cultivate the same rural naïveté, whose appearance was well-suited to the sordid atmosphere of the postwar era but whose fresh substance constituted a healthy antidote.

In the following years he painted many still lifes and landscapes. At times these works were dominated by sombre tones, and at others by a certain geometric schematic quality which we find in the view of Alba de Tormes in this collection.

Yet in the late 1940s colour began to find its way into his creations, making inroads with an expressive intensity that smacked of both the Fauves and the Expressionists. The new palette was a symptom of a refreshing vitality, although this would never replace the imagery of his early Vallecas period, as the work Caballo rojo [Red Horse] in the Banco Santander Collection clearly proves. [Jaime Brihuega Sierra]