We live an explosion of movements that try to raise awareness about the need to fight against climate change and the abusive use of plastics so damaging to the environment; we often tend to identify these initiatives with the activity of NGOs and other groups with campaigns seeking for a great impact on media. However, artists are also very aware of this problem and often include this theme in their works.

Mandy Barker, 500-plastic-piece composition picked up in a beach, 2018

A way to denounce extreme capitalism and overexploitation is by creating works with reused pieces or using the plastic itself as the main raw material, as well as creating pieces in idyllic landscapes, with the aim of emphasising the ephemeral survival of those places. The proposals are diverse: a multitude of techniques, disciplines and finishes; but the purpose is the same because undoubtedly the human being has a responsibility to the planet. On many occasions, artists associate with groups of activists to develop large-scale actions that boost the message and generate a global awareness.

Marcel van Es, drawing in Novo Sancti Petri beach, Cádiz, 2018

This is the case of Marcel van Es, a Dutch artist who for years cooperates with Greenpeace and Ecologistas en acción by creating drawings on the wet sand of the Bay of Cádiz. In April 2018 he carried out his third intervention at the Novo Sancti Petri beach in Cádiz, with a work over 25 meters in diameter that depicts a sea turtle surrounded by plastics. His vulnerable, short-lived drawings represent the fragility of nature and its impossibility to fight against the excessive abuse of natural resources and its capacity for regeneration.

Isabel Muñoz, “Water”, 2016

Other authors opt for proposals less linked to denounce movements and more focused on a personal discourse that highlights the problem within their own line of work. This is what happens with the project "Water" by Isabel Muñoz, who, true to her careful and exquisite photography, presents a series of images that underline the purity of the sea and the risk into which it is permanently put. With this underwater photography, the impact of the textures and the colours on the submerged bodies represents in an allegorical and elegant way the oppression and adherence of the plastics to the living beings in their marine environment, something against which they can not fight for themselves.

Maria Cristina Finucci, installation in the Island of Mozia, Sicily, 2016

Also, some artists devote their work almost wholly to deal with the problem of climate change and pollution by plastics. The project "The garbage patch state" has become the main leitmotif of Maria Cristina Finucci’s work. With a multidisciplinary proposal, which includes both performances, photography and installations, her production process is open to external contributions and international presence. It is an interactive and shared project that has already gone through Rome, New York, Madrid or Geneva. Because Maria does not conceive art if it does not fulfil a social function, and in this case, her educational mission is more than evident.

Daniel Barrio. Guest artist of the third edition of OPEN BOOTH. Courtesy of the artist.

DESPIECE. PROTOCOLO DE MUTACIÓN

As part of the Art Madrid’26 Parallel Program, we present the third edition of Open Booth, a space conceived as a platform for artistic creation and contemporary experimentation. The initiative focuses on artists who do not yet have representation within the gallery circuit, offering a high-visibility professional context in which new voices can develop their practice, explore forms of engagement with audiences, and consolidate their presence within the current art scene. On this occasion, the project features artist Daniel Barrio (Cuba, 1988), who presents the site-specific work Despiece. Protocolo de mutación.

Daniel Barrio’s practice focuses on painting as a space for experimentation, from which he explores the commodification of social life and the tyranny of media approval. He works with images drawn from the press and other media, intervening in them pictorially to disrupt their original meaning. Through this process, the artist opens up new readings and questions how meaning is produced, approaching painting as a space of realization, therapy, and catharsis.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación is built from urban remnants, industrial materials, and fragments of history, inviting us to reflect on which memories we inherit, which we consume, and which ones we are capable of creating. Floors, walls, and volumes come together to form a landscape under tension, where the sacred coexists with the everyday, and where cracks matter more than perfection.

The constant evolution of art calls for ongoing exchange between artists, institutions, and audiences. In its 21st edition, Art Madrid reaffirms its commitment to acting as a catalyst for this dialogue, expanding the traditional boundaries of the art fair context and opening up new possibilities of visibility for emerging practices.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación emerges from a critical and affective impulse to dismantle, examine, and reassemble what shapes us culturally and personally. The work is conceived as an inseparable whole: an inner landscape that operates as a device of suspicion, where floors, walls, and volumes configure an ecosystem of remnants. It proposes a reading of history not as a linear continuity, but as a system of forces in permanent friction, articulating space as an altered archive—a surface that presents itself as definitive while remaining in constant transformation.

The work takes shape as a landscape constructed from urban waste, where floors, walls, and objects form a unified body made of lime mortar, PVC from theatrical signage, industrial foam, and offering wax. At the core of the project is an L-shaped structure measuring 5 × 3 meters, which reinterprets the fresco technique on reclaimed industrial supports. The mortar is applied wet over continuous working days, without a pursuit of perfection, allowing the material to reveal its own character. Orbiting this structure are architectural fragments: foam blocks that simulate concrete, a 3D-printed and distorted Belvedere torso, and a wax sculptural element embedded with sandpaper used by anonymous workers and artists, preserving the labor of those other bodies.

A white wax sculptural element functions within the installation as a point of sensory concentration that challenges the gaze. Inside it converge the accumulated faith of offering candles and the industrial residues of the studio, recalling that purity and devotion coexist with the materiality of everyday life. The viewer’s experience thus moves beyond the visual: bending down, smelling, and approaching its vulnerability transforms perception into an intimate, embodied act. Embedded within its density are sanding blocks used by artists, artisans, and laborers, recovered from other contexts, where the sandpaper operates as a trace of the effort of other bodies, following a protocol of registration with no autobiographical intent.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación addresses us directly, asking: which memory do we value—the one we consume, or the one we construct with rigor? The audience leaves behind a purely contemplative position to become part of the system, as the effort of moving matter, documentary rigor, and immersive materiality form a body of resistance against a mediated reality. The project thus takes shape as an inner landscape, where floor, surface, and volume articulate an anatomy of residues. Adulteration operates as an analytical methodology applied to the layers of urban reality, intervening in history through theatrical and street advertising, architectural remnants, and administrative protocols, proposing that art can restore the capacity to build one’s own memory, even if inevitably fragmented.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIEL BARRIO (1988, Cuba)

Daniel Barrio (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1988) is a visual artist whose practice articulates space through painting, understanding the environment as an altered archive open to critical intervention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Cienfuegos (2004–2008), specializing in painting, and later at the Madrid Film School (ECAM, 2012–2015), where he studied Art Direction. His methodology integrates visual thinking with scenographic narrative.

His trajectory includes solo exhibitions such as La levedad en lo cotidiano (Galería María Porto, Madrid, 2023), Interiores ajenos (PlusArtis, Madrid, 2022), and Tribud (Navel Art, Madrid, 2019), as well as significant group exhibitions including Space is the Landscape (Estudio Show, Madrid, 2024), Winterlinch (Espacio Valverde Gallery, Madrid, 2024), Hiberia (Galería María Porto, Lisbon, 2023), and the traveling exhibition of the La Rioja Young Art Exhibition (2022).

A member of the Resiliencia Collective, his work does not pursue the production of objects but rather the articulation of pictorial devices that generate protocols of resistance against the flow of disposable images. In a context saturated with immediate data, his practice produces traces and archives what must endure, questioning not the meaning of the work itself but the memory the viewer constructs through interaction—thus reclaiming sovereignty over the gaze and inhabiting ruins as a method for understanding the present.