Art Madrid'23 – 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.

 

 

In the year 2020 in the heart of Barcelona a wandering gallery was born, the same one that in February 2021 would debut at Art Madrid with an exhibition proposal focused on contemporary portraits; with this subject matter it would manage to create a powerful dialogue between artwork and audience and make the seal Inéditad remain in the history of the event that contained it.

Jean Carlos Puerto. Protección. Oil and copper leaf on wood. 60 x 48. 2021. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Since that first time and until today, the wandering gallery has managed to build projects on otherness, has repositioned in the spotlight the discourses on the LGTBIQ+ collective, has consolidated a group of artists who share its principles of resilience and empathy and the best thing is that it continues to bet from the professionalism and commitment to give voice to the difference.

Claudio Petit-Laurent.. El Joven de la Perla. Oil on wood. 30 x 30 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Inéditad Gallery, thanks to its founder Luis López, its collaborators and the infinite possibilities manifested in the works of the artists it represents, is a gallery that has demonstrated its capacity and courage to stimulate the sensibility of the public through art and seduce a generation that moves between the glass window and the analogical story. Inéditad is a nomadic gallery that has gathered around it a community of artists and has moved the context with exhibition projects that think about LGTBIQ+ art without prejudices.

Pepa Salas Vilar. Las marcas del arcoiris. Oil on canvas. 40 x 50 cm. 2022. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Pride and Prejudice was inaugurated. An exhibition that brings together the works of sixteen artists: Abel Carrillo, Alex Domènech, Carlos Enfedaque, Silvia Flechoso, Jamalajama, Daniel Jaén, Claudio Petit-Laurent, Jean Carlos Puerto, Fernando Romero, Pablo Rodríguez, Pepa Salas Vilar, Jack Smith, Pablo Sola, Bran Sólo, Elia Tomás and Utürüo. Painting, illustration, photography and digital art are the manifestations that bring into dialogue around fifty neatly threaded pieces, in a discursive line that discusses such a latent phenomenon as discrimination. To achieve this, the artists invited to the exhibition question themselves whether: Does discrimination exist within the LGTBIQ+ collective?

Pride and Prejudice Official Poster. Image courtesy of the gallery.

With approaches on and from the body, the proposal invites to celebrate diversity, proposes to question and self-question the prejudices and attitudes of society against the collective. Pride and Prejudice is a space for dialogue about the constructs imposed on us by society. It is also an oasis in which to deconstruct with tolerance and respect the subjectivities that sometimes prevent us from approaching the production of the participating artists, simply because "the beautiful" does not fit in an androgynous body. The subjugation of stereotypes are pressed with determination to find the beauty of diversity in other palpable facets of reality.

Pablo Sola. All men are dogs. Photography. 2014. Image courtesy of the gallery.

Throughout these three years Inéditad has stimulated the vindictive projection towards bad practices, has questioned estates around the LGTBIQ+ body and the most admirable thing, is that these capacities have resurfaced around the dialogue and the visual narrative of the stories that are told from the visual: Artworks that are people, art that is, per se, humanity. Overcome impositions and accept what is different in order to continue fighting against homophobia, biphobia, lesbophobia or transphobia and defend the equal rights that all the acronyms of the collective deserve in our community.

That's Pride and Prejudice: One creature, the happiest in the world. And maybe other projects and other people have said it - or felt it - before, but none so fairly.

Silvia Flechoso. Hola, soy maricón. Oil on canvas. 73 x 54 cm. 2023. Image courtesy of the gallery.

From June 8th until June 22nd you can visit Pride and Prejudice. Carrer de Palau núm. 4. Canal Gallery space. Barcelona.