Arco 2019

Art is a mirage. A mirage, just like the oasis that appears in the desert. It is very beautiful, until the moment when you die of thirst, obviously. But we do not die of thirst in the field of art. The mirage has substance.

Marcel Duchamp

Madrid’s Contemporary Art Fairs Party

Arco, Art Madrid, Drawing Room, Just Madrid, Urvanity, Sam, Hybrid, Flecha… This week Madrid is turned into the capital city of art exhibitions. Contemporary art is a witness of our time; it talks to us about who we are, where we come from, and where we’re going to. These fairs are a special occasion to witness this and to become, for a week, a decipherer of the information that only art, in a straightforward manner, is capable of making us feel. Art is a phenomenon detector, and it can reveal them to us in a premonitory way, instants before we’re even aware of what is happening. That is why it’s so important to get closer to the world of contemporary art.

“Beauty Is in the Eye of the Beholder”

Today the spectator plays a key role in the world of art. As Duchamp said: “Against all opinion, it’s not painters but the spectators who make the paintings.” The spectator, in some cases, can even actively participate in the process by finishing, constructing, or deconstructing them; in brief, completing the work with their interpretation. The spectators and their evolution are what call and produce the changes in the artistic expression. In this way, I was invited by the artist I visited in my first dip into Arco 2019 to complete their work with my experience and interpretation.

First experience: first picture. Installation created by Andrea Galvani, The Ryder. The artist, this year’s winner of the Arco de Audemars Piguet award, explained his work: “Mathematics are a universal language, and this installation is the yearning of portraying the things that can’t be seen with the language of mathematics. For example, a supernova, which we can’t see, can be reproduced with a mathematical formula.” In the installation the mathematical formulas are written by performers, while the spectator is invited to bear witness to a ritual in which what we can’t see becomes visible.

Second experience: second picture. I was in the Peru stand, this year’s invited country at Arco 2019. The piece I liked the most was from Teresa Burga, a pioneer of conceptual art in her country. Her work, Borges 2017, is an installation where the artist transforms a poem by Borges into a colourful musical score that endows it with music. The spectator receives a double stimulus: a visual one, through a tapestry resulting from the translation of the poem into the colourful musical score, and an auditive one, through a recording of the poem coupled with music from an oboe. In this way, the experience turns into a well rounded experience for the senses, in which knitting is linked to poetry, color and music.

Third experience: third picture. This year at the El País stand, designer Celia Valverde, in a search for the union between art and fashion, dressed with her spring-summer collection the people attending the newspaper’s space in the fair. Celia Valverde told us that she gets inspired when she creates her collection in the world of art. And her creations, working like moving paintings, are surrounded at the stand with works by Fernando Bryce and Alicia Martín. Their works, books, and newspapers fill the walls of the stand, as a homage to culture. In this way, El País dressed their stand with fashion and art this year.