Arco is a fair in its forties, 42 years old to be more exact, it has gone through many crises and overcome the impetuous ups and downs of the market. But there she continues, more calm, predictable and conservative than in her early youth, but preserving her status as a great art event that no one wants to miss. Definitely banished those irreverent installations that made rivers of ink flow in the eighties and nineties when Spain wanted to be (and appear) modern, the biggest commotion in the corridors of the Ifema pavilions was once again carried out by the Kings, who this Thursday, in their inaugural visit they stopped to listen to a brief performance of a performance by Blanca Paloma, the winner of the Benidorm Fest and Spain's representative at Eurovision, and they skipped the tour to chat with Eulalia Ramón, the widow of Carlos Saura who, by the way, He has work in the Max Estrella gallery.
Visitors who come to Arco these days (open to the general public from Friday to Sunday) will have the opportunity to discover Goya, May 3, a short film of just over 14 minutes in which the recently deceased filmmaker reconstructs the tragic episode in the history of Spain when French troops executed dozens of patriots who had risen up against Napoleon's Army in various places in Madrid. "I didn't want to limit myself to transferring the painting to an audiovisual piece, but also the previous moments," says Eulalia Ramón, who acted in what would be the director's penultimate work and is currently triumphing at festivals with her short film Cuentas divinas.
The work, which Saura conceived as a plea against wars once the invasion of Ukraine had already taken place, is not for sale (it is a production of the regional television of Aragon), but it marvelously accompanies one of Jorge Fuembuena's photographs, who accompanied him during filming. Saura, who according to Ramon had advanced a miniseries on Lorca, a staging of The Three-Cornered Hat and a biopic of Montseerrat Caballé, still had time to complete one last documentary, The Walls Talk, about man's need to draw the world, from cave paintings to current urban graffiti. The director of Deprisa, Deprisa would surely have loved the sculpture exhibited by the Galería Alegría J'aurai ta peau by the French Ken Sortais. A graffiti artist who, tells the gallery owner Sebastián Rosselló, secretly, at night, or disguised as a park and garden worker, covers the fountain sculptures with layers of latex until the skin acquires enough consistency to tear it off and make inflatable sculptures with them. that seem as heavy as life.
Something similar happens with the breadcrumb sculptures made by Agustín Ibarrola in prison, between 1962 and 1965 (in José de la Mano). His fellow prisoners gave him crumbs from their crusts so that he could make geometric objects with saliva. The sculptures were kept by the family. “It is interesting to see how some common prisoners helped an artist retaliated by Francoism, they helped an artist even without knowing what they were doing,” says José de la Mano.
What about NFTs? If the question is thrown in Arc, two possible answers would be that either they are in crisis or the joke is over. There are hardly any, and the most exciting have an impact in the real world, like the one presented by the Boa Mistura collective at Galería Ponce Robles. They sell a Vallecas mural divided into 35 panels that correspond to another 35 NFT. Every time someone buys one, the team on duty in Vallecas gets on the crane and makes the fragment disappear, broadcasting the process via streaming.
By the way, have you ever heard of Cristina BanBan? She is 35 years old, she was born in El Prat de Llobregat and, after winning the Art Club Prize from the Royal Academy of Arts in London, she is currently sweeping New York, where she lives. But "as Paco de Lucía used to say, to succeed you have to succeed at home," she points out at the Perrotin gallery stand, where she has sold the three large canvases with which she presented herself ($90,000 each). A figurative work that puts women at the center and delves into the personal, "almost as if it were a diary" of life, but that each time pushes the limits towards abstraction.
Also the Barcelona painter Marria Pratts, 33 years old, has sold the two large oil paintings (45,000 and 26,000) that they presented at the Mayoral gallery. "They are in very good hands," says the gallery owner. “With young artists you have to be very careful who you sell to because otherwise you can harm them. And there are few artists like Marria with that ability to become so important”. Another person who is causing a lot of talk is Eva Fabregas (Barcelona, 1988), whose work in Bombon projects has been awarded by the Community of Madrid and will become part of its collections.
