Art Madrid'26 – Fernando Latorre Gallery in Art Madrid\'15

Obra de Fabio Camarotta.

 

With roots from Zaragoza, Fernando Latorre Gallery was founded in 1991 in this city of Aragon and there he developed an intense labor of promotion of young talents for more than a decade. In 2003 Fernando decided to come to the capital, where he opened a space dedicated to contemporary art in Doctor Fourquet street, central axe of arts neighbourhood of Madrid. A new phase in this trajectory arrives in 2012, when he ventured to open a huge local in Rivas Vaciamadrid, while he keeps his office in Doctor Fourquet. The Rivas's space offers a new surface of 200 m2 completely dedicated to promotion and exhibition of his artists, a clear local whose walls never are empty.

 
 

Obra de Daniel Merlin.

 

Fernando knows how to identify young artists with a promising perspective. Among them we must mention Daniel Merlin, painter of 30 years old that has been recently rewarded with the BMW Award of Painting. He was born in Buenos Aires, where he started his contact with art and his first studies of painting. Then, he moved to the old continent and he studied with the painter Emma Gans in Madrid and he attended the painting and drawing workshop of the Cultural House of San Lorenzo del Escorial, led by the painter Álvaro Sellés. The portraits of this artist, of big dimensions, causes a strong impact of attraction and bewilderment. He uses the technique with a result similar to a big collage, splitting the faces, dividing, as if they were painting tesseras, the features and the expression, but respecting the essence of the portrayed. The neutral background of his pieces helps to strengthen the contrast effect and to stress the importance of the looks and the expressions.

 
 

Obra de Eok Seon.

 

On the other hand, we must make reference to the interesting proposal of the Korean artist Eok Seon who, after being exiled from his birth city, and after a long personal journey searching for emotional and vital stability, he decided to settle definitively in Madrid in 1993. Focused on sculpture and on work with geometry and space, he uses different materials from wood to glass. His work is now placed in numerous public and private collections, like the Fundación Privada Allegro (Madrid), the Fundación Casa Museo “A Solana” (Pontevedra), the Schema Art Museum de Chong Ju (Corea del Sur) and several private collections in Las Vegas and Indianápolis (EE.UU.), among many others.

 

 


ABIERTO INFINITO. LO QUE EL CUERPO RECUERDA. CICLO DE PERFORMANCE X ART MADRID'26


Art Madrid, committed to creating a discursive platform for artists working within the field of performance and action art, presents Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda, a proposal inspired by Erving Goffman’s ideas in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Amorrortu Editores, Buenos Aires, 1997).

The project unfolds within a theoretical framework that directly engages with these premises, conceiving social interaction as a stage of carefully modulated performances designed to influence others’ perceptions. Goffman argues that individuals deploy both verbal and involuntary expressions to guide the interpretation of their behavior, sustaining roles and façades that define the situation for those who observe.

The body — the first territory of all representation — precedes both word and learned gesture. Human experience, conscious and unconscious alike, is inscribed within it. Abierto Infinito: lo que el cuerpo recuerda departs from this premise: representation inhabits existence itself, and life, understood as a succession of representations, transforms the body into a space of constant negotiation over who we are. In this passage, boundaries blur; the individual opens toward the collective, and the ephemeral acquires symbolic dimension. By inhabiting this interstice, performance simultaneously reveals the fragility of identity and the strength that emerges from encounter with others.


PERFORMANCE: OSCURECER UN PAPEL. BY ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

March 5 | 7:00 PM. Galería de Cristal of the Palacio de Cibeles.


Nocturnality. Installation. Rocío Valdivieso..


Oscurecer un papel forms part of a series of actions in which the artist engages in reading through repetition, memorization, and a measured degree of improvisation. Within this framework, a non-linear mode of reading emerges from a written text that is transformed when spoken aloud, assuming a different form in the act of articulation. The texts stem from an ongoing investigation into materiality, space, the relationships between body and matter, writing, the sculptural, and a sustained interest in the exploration of voice and orality.

The material from which Oscurecer un papel is constructed consists of a collection of purchase receipts the artist has been accumulating over time. The printed text they contain, together with the action of bringing them into proximity with a heat source—thereby activating the thermal paper on which they are produced—generates meanings that revolve around the notions of consumption and wear.


Rocío Valdivieso. Latent Aura. Performance documentation.


ABOUT ROCÍO VALDIVIESO

Rocío Valdivieso is an artist, researcher, and cultural manager. She is currently a PhD candidate in Fine Arts at the Complutense University of Madrid. She holds an MA in Research in Artistic Practices from the University of Castilla–La Mancha (UCLM) and a BA in Fine Arts from the National University of Tucumán, Argentina. She was a Fundación Carolina fellow from 2022 to 2023. She currently co-directs Errática. Laboratory of Processes and Critique in Madrid, alongside Romina Casile.

She was part of the PEEPA 2023 Program at the Centro de Residencias Artísticas, Matadero Madrid. She completed the 2021/22 Artists Program at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, and in 2020 participated in the Intensive Curatorial Program of Proyecto PAC at Galería Gachi Prieto, Buenos Aires. She received the Visual Arts Promotion Award at the 4th Visual Arts Week of the Ente Cultural de Tucumán. She was awarded an AUGM scholarship for an exchange residency at UNESP, São Paulo, Brazil. She also participated in the International Residency Program La Ira de Dios and in the Acéfala Galería Residency for Argentine artists.