The world is turned upside down but the art business keeps going. Despite Israel’s relentless bombing of Palestine, Russia’s war against Ukraine, the worsening ecological crises around the world or the threat of the far right, Arco, the contemporary art fair in Madrid, which yesterday opening its doors to professionals and collectors (from Friday, to the general public), it seems like a safe and predictable bubble, immune to what happens outside.
The defeated tennis player on the grass court of the Elmgreen duo
It’s hard to find artists who stick in the mud of the slaughter in Palestine. Eugenio Merino, whose voice reaches Carabanchel this year with his moving installation of a García Lorca in a pit, exposes to ADN two soles of shoes on which he has engraved the map of Gaza. It’s called Pisoteando derechos. And Francesc Torres, in T20, titled a collage Israel and Palestine without talking about Israel and Palestine in . Playing with letters and burnt glasses, it reads: “3 of the others, 2 of ours”. It also seems that the ghost of Ukraine has disappeared, whose war broke out precisely in the midst of the Arco celebration. Today it barely finds an echo beyond the Voloshyn gallery, where the artist Danilo Halkin has recovered three stained glass windows that were placed in public buildings during the Soviet occupation and contrasts them with a painting showing their current state, without life, fatally blackened.
But there is much more to see at an overwhelming fair featuring 205 galleries from 36 countries. The VIP day is full of wealthy collectors. More than 350 run through the corridors at the invitation of Ifema, with the advantage that, as the director of the fair, Maribel López, acknowledged, many of them, especially Latin Americans, no longer have to pay for their stay because they are almost from Madrid, residents of the Salamanca neighborhood. Letting yourself be carried by the current, you can reach the Caribbean, which this year is the protagonist of Arco in a section curated by Sara Hermann and Carla Acevedo-Yates in which it has nothing to do with the turquoise waters of a postcard. “There is not one Caribbean, but many, and they are spaces of exchange and of constant instability and turbulence”, they affirm.
To start sailing, the Cuban Quisqueya Henríquez settled in the Dominican Republic invites us to an ice cream made with water from the Caribbean Sea, salty and intense blue, like the one on Caletas beach, the last place immigrants see when they leave by plane. Next to him, Noe Martínez records a performance in which he relives the trauma of the trafficking of indigenous people, not only by the European colonizers but also between Mexico and the Caribbean. Painful stories that, from Helga de Alvear, Santiago Sierra remembers in small prints where the Spanish coat of arms is drawn with the blood of former overseas settlers (600 euros each).
Everything here is on sale and the prices are dazzling. Joan Miró is once again at the top of the most sought after with Peinture, one of the 27 works on masonite he made after the outbreak of the Civil War as an exorcism, of which only two remain in Spain, at the Miró Foundation and the Thyssen. It is sold at Leandro Navarro’s gallery for 3.3 million euros. There is a Picasso in the Guillermo de Osma gallery for 2.5 million and in Mayoral you can buy Hierro en el temblor for 1.2 million, Chillida’s sculpture awarded at the Venice Biennale in 1958. And of course magnificent Tàpies, such as the last table he painted and which has not been on the market before, Gran taula (2008), in the new gallery resulting from the alliance between Prats and Nogueras Blanchard (950,000), or the one from the late eighties that is on display in Lelong for the same price.
After they fell out of favor, NFTs have passed on to a better life and AI enters them more as an element of reflection than an end in itself through artists such as Daniel G. Andújar and Joan Fontcuberta (the former recovers species extinct botanicals, the second invents non-existent ones, both in Àngels Barcelona). They are found again in T20, where Andújar prepares lists of forbidden words (he has collected about 300) that generative artificial intelligence applications classify as inappropriate, which prevents the creation of visual representations with elements of extreme violence, graphic injuries or disturbing scenes. “Could Goya have conceived works like Los desastres de la guerra or Los disparates under these premises?”, leaves the question in the air.
