Natalia Alonso Arduengo will be the curator in charge of organizing the Curatorial Program, focusing on the subject of IDENTITY, taking as a starting point the verses of Otherness, a poem by Mario Benedetti. As part of the Art Madrid'23 program, visitors will be able to enjoy a curated tour based on a selection of artworks on display at the booths of the participating galleries. The visitor will be able to follow the tour independently through the identification marks or sign up by appointment. registration for the guided tour

How do we see ourselves? Who do we want to be? What image do we project? What social conventions impose a certain way of being in the world? Is our identity as clear-cut as we think it is, or is it constantly redefined throughout our lives?

Raquel Algaba

Entre pensamiento y proyección, 2022

Cerámica esmaltada, madera y textil

130 x 100cm

«Maybe the human being should not be considered as something complete and defined, but instead as an achievement of selves that go hand in hand, as in a chain of dominoes», says Raquel Algaba (Madrid, 1992). The artist from Arancha Osoro Gallery (Oviedo), works in her pieces about the inability to define ourselves in a closed and immutable way. We are subjects in a state of work in progress that continually reformulate ourselves from a multiplicity of fragments.

Roger Sanguino

Geometría est imago LXVI, 2022

Óleo, acrílico y acero inoxidable / tela / madera

39 x 32cm

The complexity of identity is explored by Roger Sanguino (Venezuela, 1968), of DDR Art Gallery (Madrid), through portraits that he begins working in oil and ends up incorporating a network of steel wires that are placed over the faces generating a kind of «camouflage or second skin». Are they hiding their true selves, masking themselves before a society that demands clarity even at the cost of hypocrisy? Simon May in El poder de lo cuqui (Ediciones Alpha Decay, 2019) reflects:

The fraud fed by the cult of sincerity also ends up unhinging our identity: if we refuse to accept that the person we are «genuinely» is largely opaque and that we are unable to assume that our words and deeds express more than fragments or moments of our being, rather than a constant, coherent and transparent self, then we will be leading our lives according to a false image of ourselves.

Federico Granell

Remind me, 2022

Watercolour on paper

70 x 50cm

The inapprehensible self was the object of deep analysis in Romanticism. Friedrich's characters confronted with the immensity of the landscape faced, in the second instance, the vertigo of themselves, "the lacerating emptiness of an infinite and abysmal negative in which subjectivity breaks into a thousand pieces" as Rafael Argullol expressed in La atracción del abismo. Un itinerario por el paisaje romántico (Acantilado, 2006). Like the solitary subjects of the German painter whose romantic journey is the search for the Self, the protagonists of the works of Federico Granell (Asturias, 1974), from Galería Metro (Santiago de Compostela), are situated, reduced to insignificance, before the beauty of a landscape that pushes them to rediscover their signs of identity..

Jorge Hernández

Metaverso, 2023

Acrílico y resina sobre tabla

180 x 190cm

A landscape of overflowing immensity is also the scenario in which the artist Jorge Hernandez (Huelva, 1973), from Aurora Vigil-Escalera Gallery (Gijon), places many of the protagonists of his works. But the subjects of his scenes have advanced a level compared to the subject of romantic painting. They do not stand face to face with the magnificence of nature, but instead, between the two, there is an intermediate element: virtual reality glasses. The abyss is now the metaverse. The search for the " Self " is diluted and the line between real and virtual identity is becoming increasingly blurred. Both are blending and blurring. This is how Jordi Pigem explains in Pandemia y posverdad (Fragmenta Editorial, 2021) the risks of technology:

We are moving in the direction of an increasingly alienated society, as Erich Fromm had already intuited. In his short essay "The present human condition", published in 1955, he warned that we are on the way to a society as brimming with technological prodigies as it lacks the wisdom to use them, a society in which people do not guide technology, but technology guides them.

In this new circumstance, can individual identity be directed exclusively by each one of us? Agustín Fernández Mallo, in La mirada imposible (Wunderkammer, 2021), talks about the impossibility of «self-created identity»:

The idea that the subject builds his own identity and more or less controls it is nothing more than a comforting lie. Identity is constructed for us by others in a process that includes exclusively their gaze, and in which we can intervene little or nothing. Right now, throughout the length and breadth of planet Earth, either directly with our names and surnames or through second-hand data and metadata, there are scores, hundreds, thousands of pieces of information in which each one of us appears; individual identity is then the sum and mutual interaction of all that information that we not only do not control but of which we do not even know, nor will we ever know; they are for each one of us an external and impossible gaze. It is terrifying to think that individual identity, what I really am, is not in me but outside of me, constructed by others. From a contemporary meaning of the term, identity is then a complex network, the product of what others say we are, not the closed and subjective core of what each of us thinks of ourselves.

Carsten Breuer

Sophia Lauren, 2022

Acrílico sobre lienzo

160 x 100cm

Identity as self-construction would be, in the words of Fernandez Mallo, «a delirious projection, a delusion of the ego». Who hides, then, behind the characters of Carsten Brauer (Kassel, 1966), from Uxval Gochez Gallery (Barcelona). How far can these familiar faces control the look that rests on them? We have been constructing their identity as spectators through the diffusion in the iconic mass media. New technologies have accelerated and exponentially increased the impossibility of a «self-created identity». The more time a user spends absorbed in devices or applications, the more information can be extracted from his or her personality. Our digital trace is like a fingerprint. The man and woman drawn by Chamo San (Barcelona, 1987) of N2 Galería (Barcelona), do not lift their heads from the screen. Every like, every match and a handful of hashtags configure their «network-identity».

Chamo San

Noia Amb Mobil, 2022

Lápiz, carboncillo y pastel al óleo

40 x 30cm

Jordi Pigem remarks::

Our world is not perfect, but it is a happy world, at least in appearance, in the shop window, in the advertisement, in the selfie, and in the self that is exhibited through social networks. In this public display of a retouched self, individuals incorporate what was already commonplace in companies and organizations: diverting attention and resources from reality to appearance, from the product to the advertisement, from the face to the mask.

Costa Gorel

Anunciación en Elche, 2022

Oil on canvas

200 x 211cm

The contemporary human being plays a double role. On the one hand, he is an actor of his theatrical identity and, on the other hand, is a tourist of his own identity when others are the ones who build it. Those portrayed by Costa Gorel (Moscow, 1993) of Dr.Robot Gallery (Valencia), hedonistic and casual, adapt well to this double narrative. The collage of identities is for them a new practice of freedom. However, the superimposition or alternation of (self-)imposed masks limits access to the deep Self. The art critic and writer John Berger and his son, the painter Yves Berger, maintained a lucid dialogue by correspondence between 2015 and 2016. In Your Turn (GG Publishing House, 2022) Yves writes to John:

There is a French saying: "Je peux lite en elle/Luis comme dans un libre ouvert" ("I can read in her/him as in an open book"). Isn't this a very nice way of expressing this desire we have to access what is inside? The interior of those we confront and its mystery. How we wish to penetrate the outside world, not to control it, but to feel more fully part of it, to transcend the isolation we feel in our flesh and overcome the terrible border of the body...

Oliver Okolo

Orange isn't Blue, 2022

Oil on canvas

109 x 88cm

How much does the body represent a border to access who we really are? Oliver Okolo (Nigeria, 1991), from OOA Gallery (Sitges), paints blackness and defends the racial identity of his portraits. The artist takes as a starting point references from Western art to deconstruct hegemonic discourses and break down borders raised by skin color. Jordi Díaz Alamá (Barcelona, 1986) of I Inéditad (Barcelona), goes a step further by combining racial and gender vindication in the same work. Starting from the figure of the bullfighter, icon of the heteronormative white man, the artist dresses a black man who empowers his color and his sexuality.

In the essay Hyperculturality (Herder, 2018), Byung-Chul Han argues that the defacification of today's world, while bringing with it many inconveniences, holds some positive aspect:

The horizon is broken down into multicolored possibilities from which identities can be constructed. In the place of a monochromatic self enters a multicolored self, a "colored self".

Jordi Díaz Alamà

Valor y al Toro, 2023

Óleo sobre lienzo encolado a tabla

134 x 89cm

The monochromatic " Self ", so far removed from the portraits of Okolo and Díaz Alamá, would be personified by Magritte's man with a bowler hat. In the words of the surrealist painter: «The bowler hat does not represent any surprise. It is an unoriginal hat. The man with a bowler hat is the ordinary man». The established canons, the stereotypes, the uniformity of a society that tends to expel what is different and that is always ready to judge and tell others what to do or who to be...

I was always advised to be someone else / and it was even suggested that I had / notorious qualities to be so / that's why my future was in the otherness.

the only problem has always been / my congenital stubbornness / I foolishly did not want to be someone else / therefore I continued to be the same.

Xurxo Gómez-Chao

Le Fils de l´home, 2022

Photography

100 x 80cm

The painting of Daniel Bum (Villena, Alicante, 1994) takes shape as a space for subjective elaboration, where the figure emerges not so much as a representational motif but as a vital necessity. The repetition of this frontal, silent character responds to an intimate process: painting becomes a strategy for navigating difficult emotional experiences—an insistent gesture that accompanies and alleviates feelings of loneliness. In this sense, the figure acts as a mediator between the artist and a complex emotional state, linking the practice of painting to a reconnection with childhood and to a vulnerable dimension of the self.

The strong autobiographical dimension of his work coexists with a formal distance that is not the result of conscious planning, but rather functions as a protective mechanism. Visual restraint, an apparent compositional coolness, and an economy of means do not neutralize emotion; instead, they contain it, avoiding the direct exposure of the traumatic. In this way, the tension between affect and restraint becomes a structural feature of his artistic language. Likewise, the naïve and the disturbing coexist in his painting as inseparable poles, reflecting a subjectivity permeated by mystery and unconscious processes. Many images emerge without a clearly defined prior meaning and only reveal themselves over time, when temporal distance allows for the recognition of the emotional states from which they arose.

The Long Night. Oil, acrylic, and charcoal on canvas. 160 × 200 cm. 2024.

The human figure appears frequently in your work: frontal, silent, suspended. What interests you about this presence that seems both affirmative and absent?

I wouldn’t say that anything in particular interests me. I began painting this figure because there were emotions I couldn’t understand and a feeling that was very difficult for me to process. This character emerged during a very complicated moment in my life, and the act of making it—and remaking it, repeating it again and again—meant that, during the process, I didn’t feel quite so alone. At the same time, it kept me fresh and connected me to an inner child who was broken at that moment, helping me get through the experience in a slightly less bitter way.

Santito. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 81 × 65 cm. 2025.

There is a strong affective dimension in your work, but also a calculated distance, a kind of formal coldness. What role does this tension between emotion and restraint play?

I couldn’t say exactly what role that tension plays. My painting is rooted in the autobiographical, in memory, and in situations I have lived through that were quite traumatic for me. Perhaps, as a protective mechanism—to prevent direct access to that vulnerability, or to keep it from becoming harmful—that distance appears unconsciously. It is not something planned or controlled; it simply emerges and remains there.

Night Painter. Acrylic on canvas. 35 × 27 cm. 2025.

Your visual language oscillates between the naïve and the unsettling, the familiar and the strange. How do these tensions coexist for you, and what function do they serve in your visual exploration?

I think it reflects who I am. One could not exist without the other. The naïve could not exist without the unsettling; for me, they necessarily go hand in hand. I am deeply drawn to mystery and to the act of painting things that even I do not fully understand. Many of the expressions or portraits I create emerge from the unconscious; they are not planned. It is only afterwards that I begin to understand them—and almost never immediately. A considerable amount of time always passes before I can recognize how I was feeling at the moment I made them.

Qi. Acrylic on canvas. 81 × 65 cm. 2025.

The formal simplicity of your images does not seem to be a matter of economy, but of concentration. What kind of aesthetic truth do you believe painting can reach when it strips itself of everything superfluous?

I couldn’t say what aesthetic truth lies behind that simplicity. What I do know is that it is something I need in order to feel calm. I feel overwhelmed when there are too many elements in a painting, and I have always been drawn to the minimal—to moments when there is little, when there is almost nothing. I believe that this stripping away allows me to approach painting from a different state: more focused, more silent. I can’t fully explain it, but it is there that I feel able to work with greater clarity.

Crucifixion. Acrylic on canvas. 41 × 33 cm. 2025.

To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

I usually feel more comfortable leaving space for the unexpected. I am interested in uncertainty; having everything under control strikes me as rather boring. I have tried it on some occasions, especially when I set out to work on a highly planned series, with fixed sketches that I then wanted to translate into painting, but it was not something I identified with. I felt that a fundamental part of the process disappeared: play—that space in which painting can surprise even myself. For that reason, I do not tend to plan too much, and when I do, it is in a very simple way: a few lines, a plane of color. I prefer everything to happen within the painting itself.