The origins of the art of action can be located in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements of 1920, where the first events or encounters in which the terms collage or assemblage are consolidated sprung up. However, it was not until the 1960s that these manifestations acquired their own entity and became an independent art movement. Action art, also called live art, delves into the idea that you cannot separate the artistic creation process from your own experience, as if everything was connected and true art is what takes place in the processes, not both in the materialised results.

Olga Diego getting ready for the performance. Photo by Marc Cisneros

Allan Kaprow, an artist born in Atlantic City and who gave true meaning to the terms happening or performance, contributed to the evolution of this idea. In the view of this author, art makes sense in the artist's relationship with the viewer in the process of artistic creation itself. Kaprow coined a famous quote on this movement:

The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible.

A tireless artist, he contributed significantly to fluxus and body art movements, and carried out countless "activities" (as he called them) throughout his career. Today we owe a lot to this pioneer, who let himself be carried away by the creative impulse channelled into actions where the ephemeral and the experiential merge.

Eunice Artur & Bruno Gonçalves during their performance. Photo by Sara Junquera

Today performance art continues to arouse enormous curiosity, even 60 years after it was born. However, within the history of art, it remains a still novel and minority trend. Precisely for this reason, Art Madrid wanted to give to action art a room into the fair and share with the big public an artistic experience, different from the exhibition offer of the participating galleries, so that contact with today’s contemporary pulse would become a memory, an event, an experience. The momentary, ephemeral nature of these actions, in such a way that they only exist in the here and now, makes each proposal doubly interesting because it is totally unrepeatable.

The “Art Madrid-Proyector’20” program included four actions during the days of the fair. We have had the opportunity to remember two of the performances in which sound and video image dominated, by Iván Puñal and Arturo Moya and Ruth Abellán. Today we give way to the other two, whose main characteristic is the generation of an intimate space, a kind of parallel reality that raises doubts in the viewer about what they are seeing and how they should understand it.

Eunice Artur during her performance. Photo by Sara Junquera

One of these works was “Partidura”, by the Portuguese artist Eunice Artur in collaboration with Bruno Golçalves, which took place on Thursday 27th at 8 pm. This project explores the idea of developing a musical notation for new forms of electronic sound, and it does so through a live intervention that incorporates plant elements, strings that vibrate with the sound and a lot of charcoal dust so that the sound waves move the elements and “draw” their own graphic representation. The performance shows Eunice interacting with these elements while Bruno makes amplified sounds with an electric guitar. The set is mysterious and poetic at the same time. The desire to transform sound into a pictorial expression unfolds in delicate, measured and stealthy actions to interfere as little as possible in the process. Eunice moves between graphite powder-coated sheets of paper hanging from the ceiling, looking for the proper angle to vibrate strings running diagonally across the sheets. This live creation process is based on waiting and contemplation, wrapped in music that seems like a mantra from other lands.

Olga Diego and Mario Gutiérrez Cru before the performace. Photo by Marc Cisneros

The last performance of the cycle was starred by Olga Diego, on Saturday 29th. The entrance of the fair transformed into an improvised stage in which the artist carried out her action "The bubble woman show". Olga Diego has been working on the concept of flight and its integration into art for some time through artefacts that can fly autonomously, without combustion. One of her most ambitious projects on this subject is “The automated garden”, an enormous installation of a hundred inflatable figures made of transparent plastic that occupied the 1,000 m2 of the Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art and the Lonja del Pescado Exhibition Hall, also in Alicante. This proposal, in addition to delving into research on the lightness of materials and the ability to stay suspended with maximum energy savings, it is an open criticism of the excessive use of plastic in our environment and its aberrant power of contamination.

Photo by Ricardo Perucha

"The bubble woman show" is an action that involves the viewer. Olga enters a giant bubble of translucent plastic keeping the air inside, and thus, as if she were a soap bubble, she moves through space until she invites someone from the public to enter the bubble with her and share an intimate moment. This personal dialogue is the most unknown and mysterious part of the process and invites us to reflect on situations of isolation, on the return to the mother's womb, on the need to protect ourselves from the excessive noise of this fast-paced world.

Both actions aroused the amazement of the visitors and turned the fair into a space in which live art played a transforming role within the wide artistic offer that the event displays each year.

LECTURAS. CURATED WALKTHROUGHS BY ART MADRID'26

Lecturas: Curated Walkthroughs by Art Madrid’26 is a cultural mediation initiative designed to bring audiences closer to the exhibitions presented by the participating galleries in this edition. Its aim is to transform the experience of the fair into an opportunity to reflect on the work of the artists featured, to analyze contemporary issues through their works, and to awaken new perspectives in society—thus fostering a critical and contextualized understanding of contemporary art as an instrument for cultural and social dialogue.

In this edition, art historians and cultural communicators Zuriñe Lafón and Marisol Salanova will address, from complementary approaches, diverse perspectives on contemporary creation and its impact within today’s social context.

Each thematic walkthrough will be structured around a carefully curated selection of ten works, accompanied by a solid curatorial discourse aimed at deepening their analysis, context, and significance. Beyond aesthetic contemplation, these guided visits will promote a critical understanding of contemporary art, facilitating direct dialogue between the audience and the curators, and encouraging a participatory and enriching experience.

With this third edition, Lecturas: Curated Walkthroughs x Art Madrid consolidates Art Madrid’s commitment to cultural mediation and the dissemination of contemporary art, offering an immersive proposal that expands interpretative frameworks and fosters the inclusion of new audiences within today’s artistic landscape.

CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE VISIBLE. CURATED WALKTHROUGH BY ZURIÑE LAFÓN

Constructions of the Visible proposes a journey shaped by one central idea: every image is a way of organizing the visible. Rather than understanding abstraction as a withdrawal from the world and figuration as fidelity to reality, this itinerary presents both as perceptual strategies. They are not opposing styles, but different ways of ordering experience. Each artist deploys a distinct strategy that affects our way of looking. Through framing, color, repetition, geometry, or fragmentation, the works do not merely show something; they position us within a particular mode of relating to the visible. They do not simply represent the world—they construct an experience from it.

As the viewer moves through the selection, they encounter different intensities of mediation. Some pieces begin with recognizable images—bodies, spaces, scenes—that appear to offer a direct relationship with reality. Yet as the gaze lingers, it becomes evident that this familiarity is carefully articulated. The rhythm of forms, the distribution of color, the organization of space, or the repetition of certain elements reveal that even the most seemingly transparent image is sustained by an underlying structure.

Other works, by contrast, reduce or transform figurative reference almost to the point of dissolution. Where the recognizable world appears to disappear, the constructive dimension of the image emerges forcefully. Geometry, gesture, or chromatic vibration do not function as an escape from reality, but as intensified forms of the world’s own appearance. Abstraction ceases to be perceived as distance and instead manifests as another way of sustaining reality—of making it appear under different conditions.

The walkthrough adopts a circular structure: it begins and concludes with the same work. This gesture does not seek repetition, but transformation. After passing through different works, different configurations of the visible—from the recognizable to the apparently abstract—the initial image can no longer be read as a faithful representation of reality. It is revealed as yet another construction within a broad field of perceptual possibilities. What changes is not the work itself, but our position before it. Looking ceases to be a passive act and becomes an active practice, an exercise in relation.

As Andrea Soto Calderón suggests, images do not merely reflect the world: they make it appear. From this perspective, the fair may be understood as a micro-cartography of ways of seeing, a space in which each work proposes a singular form of perceptual experience. The visible is not a stable datum or a neutral surface, but a process in constant elaboration, renewed in the encounter between artwork and viewer.

Constructions of the Visible does not propose a closed classification, but an invitation: to pause, to question appearances, and at the same time to allow oneself to be affected by the creative power of forms. In the movement between figuration and abstraction, we discover that every image is an operation—a way of ordering experience. The walkthrough invites us to assume this perceptual responsibility and to recognize that reality is not simply there: it is constructed in every act of creation.

SELECTION OF GALLERIES AND ARTISTS:

Ana Cardoso — Galeria São Mamede. Antonio Barahona — Galería María Aguilar. Leticia Feduchi — Galería Sigüenza. Joost Vandebrug — Kant Gallery. Beatriz Castela —Galería Beatriz Pereira. Fernando Mikelarena— Kur Art Gallery. Camil Giralt — Pigment Gallery. Virginia Rivas — Galería Beatriz Pereira. Miguel Piñeiro — Moret Art. Maria Svarbova — Galería BAT alberto cornejo.

ABOUT ZURIÑE LAFÓN

Zuriñe Lafón. Courtesy of the curator.

Zuriñe Lafón (1987) holds a PhD in Audiovisual Communication from the University of Navarra with the dissertation Francisco Calvo Serraller, Art Critic. Since 2015 she has devoted herself to research and teaching in Visual Culture, delivering courses such as Visual Culture, Photojournalism, Editorial Design, Foundational Texts on Photography, Digital Media Editing, and Fashion and Artistic Movements. She has taught at the University of Navarra, Universitat Internacional de Catalunya, UNIR, and the University of Montevideo. She has also worked in cultural departments of institutions such as El Correo Bilbao and the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid.

Through her project Atelier de imágenes, she shares research and outreach on contemporary images, creating a space dedicated to reflecting on painting, photography, and cinema. She is currently writing the book Uninhabiting the Frame, a research project on the ontology of photography through selected photographic archives of women in Spain.

“THE PREDOMINANCE OF BRILLIANT AESTHETICS”. CURATED WALKTHROUGH BY MARISOL SALANOVA

Framed by the theme “The Predominance of Brilliant Aesthetics”, this selection brings together works that understand brilliance not as superficiality, but rather as visual strategy, as contemporary seduction, as a symptom of an era that requires impact, color, polish, and perhaps at times certain excesses in order to think (itself).

This proposal, in which works of different formats and techniques coexist and are created by artists from various generations, opens a debate aimed at better understanding our present aesthetic condition—one in which the public is invited to participate.

Marisol Salanova approaches brilliant aesthetics as a tension rather than a closed solution. In the works of Urdiales and Celada, brilliance appears as an internal conflict within pictorial language; in Monge and Okuda, so different from one another, as a direct spectacularization of space and the urban imaginary; in Juncal, Rivas, and Alpuente, as a fragile balance between material and perception; and in Palito Dominguín, as an iconographic and symbolic affirmation, almost performative in nature. What particularly interests the curator and critic about this group is that brilliant aesthetics is not perceived as unified, but fragmented—at times ironic, at times ornamental, at times almost violent; elsewhere softened or symbolic. It is not an innocent brilliance: it seduces, imposes, distracts, and orders the gaze, much like the visual ecosystem in which we live today.

SELECTION OF ARTISTS AND GALLERIES:

Eduardo Urdiales — Inéditad Gallery. Arol — Est_ArtSpace. Perrilla — Est_ArtSpace. Ángel Celada — Galería BAT alberto cornejo. Antonio Ovejero — CLC Arte. Alejandro Monge — 3 Punts Galería. Okuda San Miguel — 3 Punts Galería. Steen Ipsen — Kant Gallery. Marina Puche — Galería Alba Cabrera. Marcos Juncal— Galería La Mercería. Gemma Alpuente — LAVIO. Palito Dominguín — DDR Art Gallery.

ABOUT MARISOL SALANOVA

Marisol Salanova. Foto de Bertha Delgado.

Marisol Salanova is an art critic, exhibition curator, and director of the platform Arteinformado. She is a regular contributor to ABC and Cadena Ser. She holds a degree in Philosophy and a Master’s degree in Artistic Production. She has taught at university level and has published essays such as Art Criticism Today (Akal, 2024).