Although the formal inauguration will be this Thursday, when Felipe VI and Queen Letizia of Spain walk through these corridors of the most prestigious art fair in Spain and one of the benchmarks in the market for the purchase and sale of works of art globally, ARCOmadrid has already come to a boil.
This Wednesday, hundreds of collectors, gallery owners, artists, passionate about art and curious people populated halls 7 and 9 of the Ifema fair center, on the outskirts of Madrid, where the 211 galleries from 36 countries, nine of which are Argentine , expose the best of the artists they represent.
To them is added the section Arts Librisdedicated to publishing houses, photobooks and art publications where This year Ñ, Clarín’s cultural magazine, has its own space to celebrate its 1000th edition, that was presented at the Instituto Cervantes in November, and the two decades that it has been discovering trends, diving into the avant-garde and providing new perspectives on the consecrated of culture.
In this edition of ARCOmadrid, the interviews scheduled in the Speaker’s Corner include a series of talks organized by Revista Ñ in which Matilde Sánchez, writer and general editor of Ñ and Cultura de Clariontalks with some of the Argentine artists present at the fair.
This Wednesday he did it with Tomas Saraceno and with Diego Bianchi, compatriots whose works came to ARCOmadrid through European galleries.
“His work is constructions in height”, Sánchez defined Saraceno, an artist from Tucumán who today is among the most valued Argentines worldwide.
His work, meditated on in the studio set up in a former industrial center in Berlin where he lives, shines at ARCO through the galleries Neugerriemschneider, from Berlin, and Piksummer, from Genoa.
Sánchez highlighted, as one of the trademarks of the art that Saraceno displays, instability. “The ideal would be to dismantle that conformity, which many times the modern world leads us to classify rigidly”said the artist who admits to having a weakness for clouds -Cloud Cities is a series of installations- and spiders -which he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires-.
Last month he was in the Puna of Jujuy, recreating “a project that we did in 2017, 2020 and now, in 2023,” he said during the talk.
The project, excessive and committed to the environmental fight, took him to the area of Alfarcito, in the Salinas Grandes, where he once again launched one of his care of Aerocene that conquer the sky without fossil fuels.
This time, his performance denounced the extraction of lithiumused in cell phone batteries and electric cars: “To extract a ton of lithium, two million liters of water are needed”he pointed out in ARCO.
In another passage of the talk, Saraceno reminded Gyula Kosice: “I summoned him to give a talk at the Faculty of Architecture -Saraceno graduated as an architect-. He always attracted me to his conception of space as fictional and the function he gave to spaces”.
Matilde Sánchez pointed out that Saraceno’s work is inserted and adapted to global contexts although, nevertheless, it has roots in a territory that is Argentine soil. He asked him how he thought about nationalities or belonging.
Saraceno, who last year conquered the exclusive space The Shed in New York with an exhibition and caresses the sky of Barcelona with a permanent installation in the dome of the Torre Gloriès, then appealed to his family history: his birth in 1973, exile his parents, who worked in an agricultural cooperative, in Italy, and a childhood-adolescence that led him to question his origin and identity: “I suffered a lot in the World Cups,” he ironized. In Italy he was the Argentine and in Argentina he was the Italian. That led me to wonder all the time where I’m from.”
Make art with what abounds
Before an audience that included Teresa Bulgheroni, president of Malba, already Larisa Andreani and Eduardo Mallea, president and vice president of the arteBA Foundation, the editor of Revista Ñ had previously spoken with Diego Bianchianother Argentine artist present at ARCOmadrid and represented by the French gallery Jocelyn Wolff.
“I understand that there is an order that I do not know but it is difficult for me to call it chaos. I always try to find rules or repetitions. I try that chaos is not an entelechy which one cannot enter”, began to define his ideas Bianchi, who is currently exhibiting his performance art in Maastricht, in the Netherlands.
Matilde Sánchez suggested that she delve into the raw material of her works: “Is using waste to find a solution to the problem of materials?” she asked.
“I usually work with what is around, what abounds, what cannot be avoided”, listed Bianchi, an artist who studied graphic design in Buenos Aires.
“It seems too much to me to go buy oil paintings if there are cables, boxes around me. I need, in order to calm down, to incorporate those waste materials into my world, to manipulate them,” she added.
Cables, chargers, plastics, polyurethane. “I have many objects in my workspace. It’s hard for me to let go of things,” Bianchi admitted. I work on what irritates me, what annoys me. A lot of my work is like a reaction to something negative at the moment. It’s a way of laughing at it, to mock me.” Bianchi is also interested in seeing “how people move”.
“I am attentive to many bodily and physical things,” he said. That allows him, according to what he said, to be alert and wait “for the work to appear.”
Bianchi coincided with the association that Matilde Sánchez made of her work with the cinema of David Cornenberg. “Yes, above all, in the film Future Crimes, where there are performers who create organs,” Bianchi admitted.
Deterioration, the passing of time on objects, people, and houses are other themes that captivate him.
“What is beauty?”, asked Sanchez.
“I believe in an idea of beauty that can also realize something horrible, that can camouflage or allow something that is totally horrible, “Bianchi replied. It is a negotiation that I establish so that beauty exists, but that it is not pure beauty.”
Madrid. Correspondent
