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.

Buying the first work of art always instils respect. A difficult feeling to define that mixes vertigo with adrenaline. But over uncertainty and caution, a pleasurable sense of connection, understanding, and desire prevails. That work that, once seen, stays in the mind, reappears in the memory several times a day and seems to tell you that it is willing to be part of your home, is the perfect candidate to make the decision.

In the first steps, many collectors do point out that one does not start from an established plan, but rather that one acquires pieces based on taste and the connection one feels with them until, after time, they realise that the volume of works that accumulates can be labelled as a "collection". For example, this is how Alicia Aza explains it:

“I was not aware that I was collecting until many years later when a third party named me as a collector and talked about my collection. In 2005, I became aware of what collecting means and decided to articulate a collection with an identity of criteria and formats”.

Marcos Martín Blanco, co-founder, with his wife Elena Rueda, of the MER Collection, shares this same opinion:

“Collecting has been a passion, driven by a visceral state that encourages you to do so. The collection, in terms of acquisitions, has not been particularly complicated because, let's face it: it is easy to buy because they are all beautiful things and you have some clear idea of where you want to go, but at first those preferences were not so clear. It is with the time that a criterion is being formed”.

It is not always this way, of course, but for the buyer who starts out on this path, the personal connection that entails the first piece is essential. There it is the germ of a lasting relationship that is not limited to a simple aesthetic question but is an open window to knowledge, to exploration, to a world that is often unknown to us and awakens our fascination. The seed of that connection is purely sentimental, and it is precisely this impulse that determines the first acquisitions. The first piece is never forgotten.

Art Madrid'20, photo by Ana Maqueda

Exceeding the usual recommendations made by advisers and agents, rare is the occasion when the art lover decides to buy by pure investment. These paths usually open later, when the volume of pieces is large enough. In addition, there are those who are a bit against this classic concept of the traditional collector, approached from an eccentric, elitist and little accessible vision. On the contrary, art buyers are, above all, art lovers, sentient beings and permeable to creative stimulus who, at a given moment, decide to deepen the relationship they already have with art to take a piece home.

It is not that hard to overcome that small psychological barrier that turns the visitor into a buyer if one approaches the matter from a more personal and intimate perspective than from social consideration. Small-format works, graphic work or serial photography are of great help for this, whose price range, generally more affordable, allows a closer comparison to the daily basis expenses. In this way, the purchase of art falls within the range of feasible activities and becomes something close and possible.

Art Madrid'20, photo by Marc Cisneros

At that moment, a different relationship with art begins, based on pure experience and coexistence with the acquired piece. Perhaps it can be seen as an act of daring, but on many occasions, it is more a matter of necessity and transformation. Collectors also agree that the acquisition of an artwork is an exercise on personal analysis and opening up to a new field of knowledge that was previously alien to us. Alicia Aza explains that the reason she acquired her first piece of video art, by Sergio Prego, is because she did not understand it and because she saw it as a challenge and an opportunity to self-improve. This open window to knowledge creates new connections and bonds with creators, as one of the most fascinating parts of the process. Candela Álvarez Soldevilla explains that

"I think the most interesting thing in the art world is talking to artists. They are people with a special sensitivity to listen and understand.”

And Alicia Aza also says:

"I can share the satisfaction of being able to count on many artists in my circle of close friends today, and that is a long way to go."

Thus, with works that seem acceptable within the horizon of expenses that each one considers affordable, it is easy to find a piece that catches us. Since then, our home also evolves into a space in which art has a permanent place and presence, and there is no doubt that this transforms us inside.

Art Madrid'20, photo by Henar Herguera

Jaime Sordo, owner of Los Bragales collection and founder of the 9915 Contemporary Art Collectors Association, has always defined his relationship with art as a true passion and a vital necessity. For buyers who start on this path, he has the following recommendation:

“It is an essential condition that they feel the need to live with their passion to enjoy the works. Another very important aspect is that before making decisions for purchases, they are informed, so it is necessary to read specialised newspapers and books, visit exhibitions and museums and a lot of contact with galleries, which is an important and very specific source of information of the artists they represent. Finally, the presence in national and international art fairs. All this generates information and training.”

Indeed, fairs have become a good place for discovery because they condense a wide offer and allow diverse and global contact in a concentrated way. For this reason, many new generation buyers start in the context of an event such as Art Madrid, whose closeness and quality constitute a unique opportunity to meet, soak up and feed the passion for art.

(*) quotes taken from various interviews published in public media between 2013 and 2019.