There is an existential crisis sweeping across the globe currently, manifesting as an ever-widening chasm between empathy and apathy, the privileged and the oppressed, predator and prey. This chasm stands open like a metaphysical wound in dire need of healing. This ancient and enduring struggle between the malignant and the benign is illustrated brilliantly and beautifully in Palacios’ latest series of mixed-media paintings, or “Wounds,” as he calls them. These works, featuring delicate paintings of women’s faces desperately caught between fight and flight, are gorgeously rendered using industrial, oil-based house paint on thin panels of clear vinyl, then layered over hard slabs of ruptured gray drywall.

Palacios uses any means available to break the drywall: anything from a hammer to his own feet is fair game. The interplay between these colorful, ethereal, seductive combined with the skeletal, crumbling, pyroclastic cloud-like texture of the exposed, granular Sheetrock underneath, eventually merge to create something truly arresting, if not entirely unprecedented in the contemporary art arena. “So much of the work is about surfaces,” says Palacios, clearly fatigued by the traditional practice of creating two-dimensional images on canvas. “I try to find new ways of expressing. I want to vindicate paint, while discovering new forms of communication.