Art Madrid'23 – AURORA VIGIL-ESCALERA, 35 YEARS IN THE WORLD OF ART

The Asturian gallery owner Aurora Vigil-Escalera is celebrating 35 years of professional career. Aurora came into contact with art when she was 17 years old, helping her mother in an apartment on Ezcurdia Street in Gijón. There, Aurora lived great artistics talks and saw an endless number of authors who today are part of the list of artists in her gallery. In 1984, Angelines Pérez, Aurora's mother, opened the Van Dyck Gallery with her father Alberto Vigil-Escalera.

In 2015, the Van Dyck gallery closed its doors and a new cycle began for Aurora, who opened the gallery that bears her name in Gijón that same year. Today, Aurora Vigil celebrates 5 years of the gallery with the firm conviction that vocation, dedication and enjoyment are the keys to success as a gallery owner. Following these parameters, Aurora Vigil presents in Art Madrid a careful selection of art works by eight multidisciplinary artists with different approaches and lines of discourse, all of them with established artistic careers.

David Morago

Cacatúa, 2016

Acrylic on wood

100 x 100cm

The artist David Morago(Madrid, 1975) will exhibit his well-known paintings with botanical and animalistic representations, images that are already part of the artist's particular universe and iconography. As if it were a Natural History cabinet, Morago provokes with his portraits of animals and plants, an effect on the viewer that takes him directly to the artist's cabinet of curiosities and wonders.

From the purest figurativism, we move to the dream universe of Rafa Macarrón (Madrid, 1981),an unconditional artist of the gallery with a personal style and a unique language, represents in his works brightly coloured figures with hydrocephalus and filiform limbs, as well as unusual and unique characters that claim all the prominence of the work.

The three-dimensional plane will be represented at the Aurora Vigil stand by the works of the artists Herminio (La Caridad, Asturias, 1945) and Pablo Armesto (Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1979), the latter more focused on his work towards an experimental space where sculpture and painting coexist with the immaterial character of light and shadow, together with technology and science. Herminio, whose work has accompanied Aurora in all the editions of Art Madrid, captures in his light and ethereal sculptural pieces his most important concerns as an artist: balance, perpetual movement and electromagnetism.

Pablo Armesto

Eclipse menguante, 2019

DMF lacado y aluminio, fibra óptica y LED

120 x 120cm

Herminio

R26, 2017

Técnica mixta y campos magnéticos

52 x 30cm

Colour and matter in their purest expression are condensed in the works of Juan Genovés and Ismael Lagares. The Valencian artist Juan Genovés investigates with the static movement of painting, where the crowd becomes the reference to talk about the problem of painting and visual rhythm. On his part, Ismael Lagares with a colourful invoice and a vibrant and fast brushstroke, distorts reality playing with textures and volumes.

Gorka García (Cádiz,1982) is one of the youngest artists and with more projection of the gallery. In his paintings, uninhabited landscapes and ruin dominate, these two elements being the main germ of his compositions. The poetics of ruin and the deep analysis of composition and forms in his works define the artist's discourse.

Juan Genovés

Arpegio, 2019

Obra gráfica muy intervenida a mano por el artista. Ed de 10

74 x 60cm

In addition to Gorka García's uninhabited landscapes, the Asturian artist Dionisio González will be presenting for the first time at the Fair a selection of his "imagined architectures ", photographic montages where the artist inhabits his own abandoned urban landscapes, in ruins or devastated by natural disasters.

Dionisio González

Buraco Quente 2, 2019

Impresión digital en papel de algodón sobre dibond y enmarcado en madera lacada en blanco

125 x 260cm

Dionisio González

Dauphin X, 2019

Photography

180 x 300cm

We interviewed the "artist architect of desires " to tell us about the main ideas and concepts he puts forward in the pieces he will be exhibiting in Art Madrid, and how in his works he is able to manipulate reality to improve it:

The gallery Aurora Vigil-Escalera presents your work in Art Madrid for the first time, how do you think your artwork will fit in at the fair?

Aurora has been in the art world for 35 years. Her professionalism and the quality of her program are undeniable. Being a gallery on the outskirts of a sparsely populated city in Gijón, the ex-centrism makes her work even more complex. When these qualities, both human and professional, are present, it is easy to fit in the artistic work and I hope that this will be the case during the duration of Art Madrid, where we will present "Dauphin Island" and "Cartografías para a RemoÇao".

In your art works you reflect on concepts such as construction and destruction, ruin and habitability, what elements define your "dystopian" ruins?

"Dauphin Island" maneuvers over an island, in the state of Alabama, that has suffered numerous natural disasters and for which I have proposed architectural projects "bunkerized" that configure new habitable structures of resistance for those spaces previously devastated by hurricanes like "Katrina". The work on Brazil's favelas is related to the desire not only to intervene but to interfere in an extreme problem, either as a designer or as a social regulator. That is, to establish a social role in defense of these settlements by proposing not their eradication but their sanitation, which is nothing more than intervention based on the already existing "cartography". The favela shows us how urban architecture can be an issue that is resolved through a popular logic.

They talk about you as the "healer of cities artist", have they proposed you to bring some of your projects to life?

I have had many offers in this sense, because the constructive approaches, which appear in my visual work, have both a critical or theoretical approach and a urban and architectural planning behind. That is to say; they can be built or consolidated in the empire. But, I would only consider executing them if they are proposed for spaces that denounce and the ideology that has articulated them that, almost always, operate from the vulnerability or social problematic.

 

Fight of Giants relies on figurative art and the character of the Pink Panther to reclaim the democratic genetics of Pop Art and its proximity to the audience, characteristics of an artistic movement inspired by the aesthetics of everyday life and consumer goods of the time. As a "happening" in the heart of the city of Madrid, Fight of Giants advocates for artistic creation in a context where the aesthetic experience is more exciting and better understood by all audiences.

Sixty years ago, Blake Edwards released in Technicolor one of the most unique feature films of the time, which would not only become part of American culture but also the international comedy universe: "The Pink Panther", whose original title was translated into Spanish as "La Pantera Rosa."

Jaime Sancorlo. Desert Patrol, 2023

In 1963, this comedy-thriller entered the bloodstream of the emerging Pop movement in a New York City experiencing the birth of the "Factory" and the rise of Truman Capote. Just like previous editions of this informal field called Battle of Giants (a "non-gallery," a "non-museum," something more than an exhibition, as defined by its creators Gabriel Suarez and Aleix Gordo), The Pink Panther reappears this time as a timeless character capable of questioning and reclaiming the present through its staging.

Sandra Rojo Picón. No9. Blue Pink, 2023

After obtaining the copyright for its reproduction directly from MGM, the commemoration of the character's sixtieth anniversary brings together thirty giant artists who, struggling together, will visually reflect on their socio-cultural present, their artistic and visual context, and their work, around the figure of the iconic pink character. At the same time, the proposal promotes the revision of the context of art itself, wanting to establish new places for the shared experience between the work of art and the observer, going beyond the apathy of the white cubes or those artistic spaces of restricted access belonging to the past.

Illan Argüello. Más chula que el 8, 2023

In this way and demonstrating the bitter heritage typical of British comedy or "pop art", the film was connected to the impulses of the new artistic exploration that was emerging in the streets of the Big Apple, far from the chromatic and gestural abstraction that had occupied the art scene during the previous decade, with figures such as Mark Rothko, Barnet Newman, Willem de Kooning or Jackson Pollock, and which had also moved away from the gaze of the general public. The New York cultural scene was now moving forward in the hands of the film director towards other paths closer to mass culture and its daily life through humor. In his first solo appearance in the Pink Phink chapter, the Pink Panther establishes a colorful battle against the traditional hegemony of the color blue, using all kinds of tricks and strategies to dye the world with his favorite color. In only six minutes in which we could see pictorial inheritances coming from the chromatic universe of Rothko and other abstract creators, the character is introduced in the culture of the politically incorrect.

Iker Serrano. Space Action Panther,2023

The Pink Panther represents irony, discontent or cynicism, clichés of what we know as "British sense of humor" and will always act, throughout all the short films, as a timeless critic, as an inter-generational and individual being capable of conversing with the general public, regardless of their origin, culture or age.

Mario Soria. Pink Biker,2023

Under the apparent atmosphere of humor and comedy of the new interpretations made by the thirty selected giants, there is a world of diverse readings and messages to be discovered, which will be unveiled by the other fundamental agent of any artistic process: the audience.

Fight of Giants gathers this time thirty individual visions for a collective and close reconstruction of its present, where the general public has been invited to participate with total freedom in this exciting process.

From May 25th to 28th. From 11h to 20h.

📍Hotel ONLY You Barquillo.

C/ del Barquillo, 21. Madrid.