FANTASTIC PLANET. El planeta salvatge: Joan Pallé

Joan Pallé works on the basis of a suspicion: over-ordering an image too much is also a way of impoverishing it.

His method begins, in fact, before the work itself. He jots things down, saves them and remembers them. He collects references in a notebook and returns to them when something –not yet necessarily clear– calls for them. Comics, literature, film, posters, fanzines, photographs found on the internet, advertising, popular culture, scientific illustration and news coexist within a single, non-hierarchical whole. It is not so much a question of producing new images as of reworking those we already have: removing them from their original context, editing them, translating them, ‘sampling’ them and seeing what happens when they come into contact with something else.

This process is constantly repeated. Virginia Woolf can coexist with John Carpenter; Daniel el Travieso with Vasili Rozánov’s Apocalypse (Sketch for the Audacity and Nihilismo. Burocracia y Muerte en Barcelona ‘Nihilism. Bureaucracy and Death in Barcelona’); an old fanzine on hypnosis, NLP and alternative psychology with a telecommunications mast disguised as a palm tree (A Citizen of Reality, a Cool Steady of Joy and Cellphone Tower). Nietzsche, Goethe, Public Enemy, American underground comics, advertising posters and found images enter and leave the work without needing to ask permission.

This transition between references also extends to forms. A house can become a model (The Death of the Moth); a still from They Live can become architecture (Buy, Obey, Submit, Consume, Conform); a phrase can become neon; a billboard can become sculpture (Sex Appeal, Power Move and Labour Force); a cartoon panel can become a drawing; and a car can become a vessel for carnal scenes (VW Golf II, Golf Party and Reverse Cowgirl). Scales also become blurred: what appears small, fragile, domestic or almost childlike may suddenly contain an excessive, absurd, aggressive or unsettling image. In Attention is precious, for example, a tiny phrase can oscillate between the economic value of attention and something far more intimate: paying attention, choosing it, giving it.

Fantastic Planet. El planeta salvatge (‘The wild planet’) begins right here. The title alludes to a critical concept in translation: perversion. Pallé appropriates it: the shift that occurs between the fantastic –soft, imaginary, even gentle– and the wild, which abruptly introduces another dimension. To translate is to interpret. And to interpret is already to shift. 

For this purpose, the artist reminds us that ideologies do not imply (nor are they synonymous) with critical thinking: they may, in fact, be precisely what hinders it. In the words of Slavoj Žižek: ‘We live, so we are told, in a post-ideological society. We are interpellated –that is to say, adressed by social authority– not as subjects who should do their duty, sacrifice themselves, but as subjects of pleasure.’¹ Hence, the aim is also to alter scales in order to modify patterns of attention, whilst maintaining ‘sampling’ as a method.

The exhibition, which is heterogeneous in nature, is presented as a non-hermetic ‘whole’ that emphasises the processual dimension of the artworks. The aim is to create a living –and deliberately scattered– testimony to a sort of anarchic manual of anti-isolation and heterogenisation, in which contradiction is celebrated and established codes, circuits and dogmas are shunned.
Pallé does not seek to resolve these contradictions, nor to construct a system. His scepticism does not consist in being against everything, but in distrusting that which claims to explain everything.

It is a way of refusing to concede to a single interpretation. Perhaps that is why humour features so often. Not to lighten the mood, but to leave a crack open so that the works may, ultimately, resolve themselves.

¹ VideoXL. (11 februray 2025). Slavoj Žižek - The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology “They Live” (2012) - (4K) [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSS6wEb-fvA.