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Caravaggio says that every painting is the head of Medusa, and every painter is Perseus. And Palenzuela’s art certainly bears this out, stabbing and mortifying canvas and medium; burying them and smothering them in oil paints that sometimes bubble up out of these incontinent craters, blurring lines and boundaries to forge images that exist only in the eye of the beholder. Closer to Bram Bogart's informalism than Jason Martin's choreographic gesture.

He does so through lucid disenchantment, with the unaffected clarity of someone observing death unabashed and fear without lowering …