The Círculo de Bellas Artes of Tenerife, located in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, presented two new exhibitions this Thursday, concluding the program designed for its Centenary celebration. These shows, part of the annual programming (September 2025 - July 2026), include both solo and group works.
The solo exhibition features the visual artist Santiago Palenzuela with his work titled De pliegues de un mapa. The group exhibition, named Nudos y enredos (Knots and Tangles), displays contributions from artists Luna Bengoechea, Paco Guillén, Lecuona y Hernández, and Gabriel Roca.
Curated by Octavio Zaya, the exhibitions will be open to the public until Wednesday, August 5th, 2026. Visiting hours are Tuesday to Saturday, from 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM and 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM.
Octavio Zaya highlights Santiago Palenzuela's consistent defense of painting as a language. According to the curator, Palenzuela's work is characterized by the accumulation and density of pictorial material, where oil becomes the protagonist, creating surfaces with an almost sculptural relief and significant tactile depth.
Zaya describes Palenzuela's concept of painting as a "living body," even referring to "corpse painting" to allude to its capacity for evolution after the artist has finished. Recurring themes in his work include the Atlantic sea, interiors, mental spaces, portraits, figures, and animals.
In these new works, Palenzuela explores painting on paper with a sculptural configuration. Through folding and manipulation of the support, the paper gains a volumetric character, expanding the artist's research into painting as matter, space, and transformation, exploring the tension between the paper's fragility and the density of its folds.
“"The greatness of Santiago Palenzuela lies in his loyalty to painting, understood in its broadest and most physical sense: as living matter, capable of growing, overflowing, aging, and transforming."
The group exhibition Nudos y enredos, in its fifth and final installment, brings together 20 Canary Islands artists to explore the complexities of the human condition and reality. Curator Octavio Zaya notes that the show celebrates "entanglement" as a methodology, suggesting that identity resides in fertile and conflictive intersections.
In this latest installment, Luna Bengoechea, Paco Guillén, Lecuona y Hernández, and Gabriel Roca explore invisible links, where knots act as systems of connection, dependence, or conflict, and tangles challenge simple categories, revealing the complexity of contemporary processes.
