BmoreArt

Those of us who’ve spent a lot of time visiting art fairs are probably accustomed to market-friendly painterly figuration dominating more than its fair share of booth wallspace. But at this year’s ARCO (which opens to the public today, Saturday, March 8) depictions of intact human bodies are eerily absent from most galleries. The few who do populate the figurative works appear unwell. The reclining figures aren’t in positions of leisurely repose—they seem to have collapsed from exhaustion. More unfortunate individuals appear to have been spliced, distorted, or reconstructed as cyborgs or mummified partial remains for forensic analysis.

Never have I felt more like a future anthropologist wandering an excavation of the present. Have we preemptively organized our visual culture around an acknowledgement of its own impending ruin?

I am always skeptical of my own first impressions when I enter any art-viewing context. After all, we never arrive at any show without our own baggage. I have spent the better part of the past few years doom-scrolling through images of war, alarming headlines about the erosion of democratic freedoms and potential asteroid strikes, and my friends’ Instagram stories of floodwaters and wildfires recorded live from their own bedroom windows. Many of the world’s governments seem to have simply given up trying to stop—or even slow—runaway climate change. I watch and read more dystopian fiction than is probably recommendable for mental health (but then again, the news is more bleak these days).

Perhaps I’m just drawn to postapocalyptic aesthetics, I wonder, after photographing a fifth gloomy-doomy booth. But, no, even the corporate sponsors here have leaned-in to the dystopian—in a far more direct way than their typical unironic endorsements of consumerism. Luxury automaker Lexus has peppered the IFEMA convention center with art cars designed by contest-winning artists. I can’t help but think of this selection as a sick preemptive subversion of vandalism. In Spain, climate activists such as Futuro Vegetal regularly make headlines for splashing paint on gas-guzzling yachts and private jets or smashing-and-slashing luxury SUVs at dealerships.

This edition of ARCO is very much not what I had in mind. Most years, the fair brings in curators for a special section that focuses on a region or concept—say, lingering colonial ties to the Caribbean or cultural similarities between the Mediterranean and Latin America—and many galleries take that curatorial suggestion as inspiration for their own booths. This year, curators Maria Wills and Denilson Baniwa collaborated on the lovely, informative survey Wametisé: Ideas for an Amazofuturismo. I half-expected most of the fair to follow their lead and end up looking like a more commercial re-hash of last year’s near-universally-acclaimed Venice Biennale, which added kindling to the artworld’s obsession with all things Brazilian and indigenous artists (or at least their aesthetics).

But maybe it’s hard for some of us to imagine a utopian future for the Amazon when it’s literally on fire?

And should I feel bad that I am actually kinda relieved/intrigued by the dystopian zeitgeist? I often get an icky feeling about the artworld’s obsession with “the other” or “centering the margins” that sometimes borders on victim fetishization. Rather than feeling good about selling paintings of people from the Global South to rich people in the Global North, a lot of the gallerists and artists in Madrid this week seem to be grappling with the existential crisis of the Wicked West (and its adjacent cosmopolitan satellites) beyond exhausting, circular privilege guilt. Seeing the foundations of our own homes begin to quiver (or, uh, in the case of the USA, completely collapse into the septic tank) has maybe reminded the artworld we’re all a bit at risk of being severly fucked, no matter how you prefer to slice your hemispheres.

What really seems to set the tone at ARCO is the strong presence and involvement of media partners (a theme obviously very dear to my own heart). Public broadcaster RTVE has a booth at the fair, alongside countless publications. Imagine the disturbing, surreal synchronicity of flipping through a critical theory book about culture and climate change while hearing a live news report meters away about severe flash floods striking Murcia. One of the strongest booths in the fair actually belongs to the newspaper El Confidencial, which is presenting works by Filip Ćustić that employ a slick brand of cyborg horror to evoke concerns about AI, (anti)social media, and violence.

And I commend newspaper EL PAÍS for actually contextualizing their presentation of Jaume Plensa’s work in a way that makes me consider it seriously. I have usually dismissed so many of his monumental sculptures of distorted heads as the kind of gimmicky crowd-pleasers that inoffensively add a selfie-op to a public plaza or shopping center atrium. Here, marble busts of migrants rest on rough-hewn plinths, suggesting they’ve been chopped from their unfortunate architectural contexts like so many appropriated statues in a British museum. And, more importantly, the artist’s own words are presented nearly as large as his sculptures:

How slow, arduous, and painstaking it is to build— yet how swift, effortless, and terrible to destroy

I believe one of the most traumatic crises facing the world today is the destruction of societies and cultures—and as a consequence, the great migrations that follow

Wars, political violence, and the ruthless exploitation of natural resources put entire communities and ethnic groups at risk, forcing them into vast displacements in search of safety and the possibility of a new life elsewhere…

…Let us give the future a chance

The fair is also characterized by involvement from public institutions both domestic and from abroad. The province of Huelva is showing strange, futuristic architectural renderings by the artist Dionisio González, who considers the natural/industrial interface between the protected wetlands of Odiel and encroaching development. The municipal galleries of Lisbon are presenting paintings by Horácio Frutuoso that heavily embrace the neoclassical-contemporary-archeological spirit. Figures (a rarity in paintings here!) are jumbled in ambiguous compositions, interrupted by excavations. The curatorial text is an equally ambiguous jumble of dreaded International Art English, but I do appreciate its thesis that a reductionist dumbing-down of written and visual culture has lead to “dangerous civilizational regressions: politics made up of reasoning of an unimaginable bizarreness, authoritarian drifts based on obscurantism, generalized satisfaction pursued in determinants of virtual interaction.”

Dystopia indeed.

But it’s the caliber of curatorial alchemy at many of the commercial galleries at ARCO that’s most impressive. In nearly every booth, works are hung in thoughtful dialog either formally or conceptually. The sightlines behind sculptures are considered—a ceramic glaze implying decay, for example, might pick up a color or texture from a painting of a ruined landscape on the wall behind it. Connections between vastly distinct works can be made based on how they’re hung. At Galería Fernández-Braso, a wall of tiny, banal oil streetscapes by painter Félix de la Concha (quite accessibly priced at €1200/each) begins to take on a sinister, claustrophobic air due to their crowding. The artist obsessively documented scenes of cars and trucks clogging streets over the course of three years, and when seen collectively they provoke a bit of dread about resource consumption and emissions. They’re hung alongside dramatic digitally-manipulated photos by Pablo Genovés, which depict grand prewar buildings filling with floodwaters. After years of draught, much of Spain is now experiencing instances of deadly flooding and uncertain climate whiplash—coupled with the certainty of sea level rise along the coasts where a disproportionate percentage of the population lives. The two bodies of very different work by very different artists speak to a cause/effect relationship when viewed together.

Just across the aisle at Galería Leyendecker, gorgeous black-and-white landscape photos by Richard Mosse reflect a different set of environmental anxieties. In one, what’s referred to as mar-de-plástico style industrial greenhouse agriculture spills across the dramatic topography of the Canary Islands—literally consuming the fertile volcanic land. Directly opposite, a photo of a house partially buried by a volcanic eruption provides its counterpoint. 

Speaking of volcanic ash, I can’t help but think of the plaster casts of Pompeii victims when viewing Jorge Satorre’s above rebar-and concrete sculpture at Bilbao’s CarrerasMugica. The whole booth speaks to harsh industrial materials and their decay. In a fair characterized by so many allusions to absent bodies, this might be one of the most disturbing, given the materials’ association with collapsed buildings.

But the most disturbing reference to the body and its relationship to the built environment might be Chiffon Thomas at Perrotin—arguably my personal favorite work at the fair. Thomas has added multiple layers of depth to a found window, patching it in with a mix of stained glass and lustrous mica. But upon closer inspection, there’s a more matte material lurking behind these hard surfaces. Different fleshtones of silicon have been stitched together in a pattern that mimics that of the soldering—a surrogate skin graft straight out of a horror film.

Another showstopper is Valencia’s SET Espai d’Art, where a massive cyanotype on fabric by Diana Lelonek dominates the booth. The artist created these landscapes to reflect the damage solar radiation is inflicting on glaciers due to human-induced changes to the atmosphere. Like so much work at ARCO this year, it’s gorgeous but foreboding.

Madrid’s Freijo Gallery is showing mischievous works by Ramón Mateos, including the polyptych “Crisis?”—consisting of seven sets of dates, presumably in which various types of crises were declared—and a video of a man using shackles to jump rope. Is this work cautiously optimistic that disasters are cyclical and humanity survives? Moments of joy (or at least play) can be found in contexts of oppression? 

I find myself more reassured by the nearby work of Concha Jerez, “A la memoria de mujeres olvidadas” (“To the memory of forgotten women”). The edited photocopies of relatively recent obituary pages highlight the lives and struggles of remarkable women—feminist activists, antifascists, educators, politicians—who stood up against authoritarianism in contexts including the Spanish Civil War and ensuing Franco years, the Taliban’s Afghanistan, the CIA’s puppet dictatorships in Latin America during the Cold War, or Putin’s Russia. Two rows of obituaries span nearly an entire wall of the booth. Most of them (but sadly not all) outlived the oppressive patriarchal governments they often (but, again, sadly not always) successfully resisted. It’s a moving, understated mini-monument to the people who usually don’t make it into the history books. To paraphrase the always on-point cultural commentator Eric Schwartau: in 1,300+ pages of The Power Broker—arguably the most celebrated biography of the 20th century—the activist Jane Jacobs isn’t mentioned once, but the reader does learn Robert Moses was uncircumcised. 

It’s one of several works at ARCO that leaves me cautiously optimistic about the dark times we’re living in. I’m especially excited about the new Opening. section of the fair, which is reserved for young galleries from around the world and has some truly innovative experimentation with materials and processes. Brigitte Mulholland is showing Emma Roche, who recreates humorous scenes of motherhood and domestic life by knitting semi-hardened paint squeezed from the tube. Across the aisle in the same section, Istanbul’s OG Gallery is showing Arda Asena, a photographer who took up weaving at SAIC. He generates the imagery for his fiber works by dunking and splashing analog color photos in a variety of different chemicals to distort and morph landscapes—creating uncertain terrains that might just reflect a bit of this generational anxiety about the anthropocene after all.

The planet may be fucked, but based on the fresh blood at Opening. the kids are alright.

There’s so much good apocalypse-adjacent work at ARCO—see some more of my highlights below—that I’m starting to think there’s some truth to that “live fast and leave a beautiful corpse” adage, at least when it comes to civilizations? All the world’s actual coral reefs might be long dead by the time we are, but I take some solace knowing some truly weird ceramic tardigrades (the ultimate survivors!) will delight some future archeologist.