Art Madrid'23 – RODRIGO JUARRANZ: A COMMITMENT TO INNOVATION AND CONTEMPORARY PRESENT

Rodrigo Juarranz, founded in Aranda de Duero in 2006 under the slogan "Art within everyone's reach", has focused its exhibition activity on supporting the most recent art, promoting exhibition projects by artists with innovative trends belonging to both the national and international sphere. Juarranz is committed to both established and emerging artists, as long as their work pursues innovation within contemporary art, both from a thematic and technical point of view.

In this edition of Art Madrid, the gallery presents the work of six contemporary artists who stand out for their multi-disciplinary nature. Amélie Ducommun, Beatriz Díaz Ceballos, Diego Benéitez, Jaime Sicilia, Jorge Marín and Marcos Tamargo, are the artists who will be exhibiting at Rodrigo Juarranz's booth.

Marcos Tamargo

De la tierra al cielo, 2019

Oil on board

180 x 180cm

Marcos Tamargo (Gijón, Asturias, 1982), the flagship artist of Rodrigo Juarranz Gallery, develops his artistic activity between the United States and Europe. A great connoisseur of conventional techniques, he has been the creator of an innovative procedure, which the author himself has designated as "Move-Art". It consists of generating on the same support two different works, one will be perceived by the spectator in a conventional way, while the other will be visible only with black light. His recent series of portraits dedicated to women who have been awarded the Nobel Prize throughout history and those who will receive it in the future have been developed with this technique. Marie Sklodowska-Curie was the first woman portrayed in this series.

The Asturian artist had already experimented with this technique in his series of portraits of the Princess of Asturias Awards, which he began in 2011, portraying among others Leonard Cohen or Haile Gebrselaise. In 2012 he portrayed architect Rafael Moneo and footballers Iker Casillas and Xabi Hernández.

Rodrigo Juarranz is the only gallery that represents in Spain the Mexican Jorge Marín, an artist that during his career has developed a figurative work that is catalogued among the most important of the contemporary art in Mexico. In his search for identity, and after experimenting with multiple disciplines and materials, Jorge Marín opts for bronze and from there on, all his work is configured under this noble and traditional material that allows him to generate in his pieces an extremely mimetic appearance to the elements of the living matter he represents. His formats oscillate between miniature and monumentality, the latter taking over public spaces, in which he establishes a conversation with the spectator which art, as he himself confesses, "is an indispensable tool for generating more reflexive and peaceful societies".

Amélie Ducommun

Caja 1, 2019

Mixta sobre papel

26 x 26cm

Amélie Ducommun (Barcelona, 1983) presents her delicate art boxes. Amélie represents nature in her works by means of a textured line of colour where she composes the landscape and the natural elements that are interrelated in it. All this from the questionable perspective of memory. Some representations are placed on the surface of the boxes, which in turn serve as a monstrance, in the manner of archives that endure.

Beatriz Díaz Ceballos (Oviedo, 1971), delights us in this fair with a proposal in which literature materialises in three-dimensional plastic works, where the book goes from being the literary support to becoming a material component of merely plastic art. The books vomit words and are transformed into sculptural forms of great beauty or generate forests that emerge from their imaginary interior. The letters are materialized by means of copper micro-fusions in which they acquire the nature of original sculptures that generate beautiful visual poems.

Beatriz Díaz Ceballos

Torre I, 2015

Mixed media

15 x 26cm

Diego Benéitez (Zamora, 1986), began his exhibition career a decade ago and is one of the artists that Rodrigo has trusted, since years ago, to present his latest creations in Art Madrid. The artist from Zamora, executes in his works a compendium between the figuration and the abstraction, capturing in his tables covered by one of the most traditional techniques of the painting, the oil, some subtle landscapes in which the simplicity of the symbols that form it, being reduced sometimes to the horizontality of the application of the colour, manage to contribute to the work a solemnity so vehement that it makes us submerge in them.

The interdisciplinary artist Jaime sicilia (Madrid, 1970), works between media as varied as painting, sculpture, photography or video. Sicily participates with his series "Waldweben", where we can see the variety and confluence of materials and techniques that he uses in his works. Acrylics, pigments and photographic emulsions are displayed on wooden, metal or plastic supports to create a subtle reality that takes us into the mysterious Wagner forest.

Diego Benéitez

El recuerdo que despierta, 2019

Oil on board

120 x 120cm

Jaime Sicilia

Waldweben 09, 2019

13 Broken Blatt and metal and plastic support

140 x 140cm

 

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.