The day has arrived, today we celebrate the inauguration of Art Madrid'19! Almost a thousand works of art, hundreds of artists and galleries are awaiting you in the Crystal Gallery of the Palacio de Cibeles from Wednesday, February 27 until Sunday, March 3. And to welcome you in a very special way, we reveal one of the surprises that you will find at the entrance to the fair: An impressive audiovisual installation by Rubén Martín de Lucas is welcoming you to the 14th edition of Art Madrid!

Rubén Martín de Lucas, "República #14" image, 2019.

Today, Wednesday 27, we inaugurate the new edition of Art Madrid, an edition that highlights the growing international participation and the firm commitment with young creators and the most contemporary works. Gallerists, artists, cultural agents, personalities from multiple areas, special guests and visitors will accompany us in an event where you can discover a spectacular display of contemporary art. In addition, after 1 PM attendees can enjoy a cocktail and talk directly with many of the protagonists of this edition.

Rubén Martín de Lucas, "República #13" image, 2019.

In Art Madrid'19 the surprises could not have been left out, and although sharing with all of you one of the great novelties of this year has been difficult, now we can tell you about the outstanding work that is welcoming you to the fair. Thanks to the collaboration with Sono, we have created a large video installation in which the new works by Rubén Martín de Lucas will be exhibited.

The Guest Artist of this edition is a multidisciplinary creator who, after his step as co-founder of the Boa Mistura collective, he has successfully continued his solo career since 2015. Since then, his main line of work has been the relationship between the individual and the territory. Martín de Lucas features new works from the “Repúblicas Mínimas” series, within the acclaimed “Stupid Borders” project: an exciting work to reflect on the geopolitical borders and the sense of ownership under a look both critical and poetic. Art Madrid presents this series in a new and outstanding media installation in which twelve of the "republics" of Martin de Lucas can be watched simultaneously, an outstanding piece that also connects directly with the main theme of the Activities Program of this year, video art.

Rubén Martín de Lucas, "República #12" image, 2019.

“Repúblicas Mínimas’” works are performative actions with which the artist intervenes the landscape symbolically. The process is simple: he appropriates 100m2, draws an elementary form in the chosen territory and lives in that new space for 24 hours. Precisely the last three editions of this work are those the artist made exclusively for Art Madrid, three unpublished works that will be discovered in the entry installation. This kind of action art always carefully conserves documentary material, video art pieces and photographs that become "poetic gestures, endowed with a mordant irony", as the creator explains.

The video installation that you will be able to enjoy at the entrance of Art Madrid, formed by 12 screens, has been made with the collaboration of Sono, a leading brand in audiovisual engineering and systems integration. With 45 years of experience, since 1972 this pioneering brand creates communication experiences based on audiovisual technology, both nationally and internationally. Thousands of installations, projects and events during these years evidence their success in a high level of competitiveness and always growing sector.

The Sono team specializes in the professional integration of audiovisual technology, and offers a variety of services that range from the ephemeral installation, in fairs, congresses or stages; also the fixed installation, in museums, stadiums, television sets or other types of corporate spaces; to content production. In this last aspect, it is worth highlighting the creation of interactive materials, such as 360º projections, augmented reality, 3D, virtual image and holograms, video mapping or the most advanced Kinect technology. These are precisely technologies that are beginning to have a more prominent presence in art circuits that are betting on new media, and more and more artists are investigating with the possibilities of these tools and expressing themselves through these languages.

With a wide range of equipment and multimedia systems to meet any need, Sono has made facilities for foreign institutions as prominent as the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, where its intervention in the Spanish Pavilion was highlighted, the Etihad Museum in Dubai or the Olympic Museum of Qatar; as well as on a national level they have developed projects for Fitur, the Maritime Museum of Barcelona, the “Recinto Modernista de Sant Pau”, the concerts held at the Sagrada Familia, the Madrid Roca Gallery or the Primavera Sound, among others.

Possibly, audiovisual art is one of those types of creation that more clearly requires some time on the spectator’ part, and for that reason, this "Repúblicas Mínimas" installation by Martín de Lucas can really be appreciated and enjoyed at the fair. Welcome to the new edition of Art Madrid!

One of the proposals included in the calendar of the “Art Madrid-Proyector'20” program was the organisation of several meetings with artists within the fair. This gave visitors the opportunity to get to know their work better and open a personal dialogue with them after the presentation of their last lines of work. From Wednesday 26th to Saturday 29th of February, we had the participation of Abelardo Gil-Fournier, Fernando Baena, Mario Santamaría and Maia Navas, a group of creators who work with the moving image, but also with the installation, technological art, performance and video art.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier's work revolves around the hybridization between the real and the sensible. This artist and researcher approaches this question in his works from a perspective in which perception, image and material production merge. Both his artistic and research practice deal with issues related to land use and plant growth without losing sight of these three points of interest. This results in works that incorporate the presence of nature from various perspectives, sometimes as a space of experimentation in which to reflect on the connection between art and politics, the relationship of the human being with the environment or the criteria for landscape intervention.

During his presentation on Wednesday 26th, Abelardo told us about some of his latest projects, in which the presence of technology is key to offering an artistic interpretation of the individual's impact into the territory. All this affects issues such as agricultural techniques, the progressive deforestation or the exploitation of land resources. The result is colour-coded pattern drawings that break down the analyzed landscape and offer a more visual and technology-based reinterpretation of these human behaviours. In addition, in this meeting, the artist explained his work “The Quivering of the Reed”, an installation that mixes video image, sound and material elements, and that plays the role of mixing the sensory with the real.

Abelardo Gil-Fournier

Fernando Baena shared a talk with us on the afternoon of Thursday 27th. This artist has focused a large part of his work on performance, happening and video pieces, many of them designed to capture the result of the action and give the work a second life in a new format. The main subjects that monopolize his work range from the treatment of sexuality and gender issues, to migratory movements and the drama of refugees, the exercise of political freedom and thought ... all of them are far-reaching issues that Fernando addresses from a familiar approach, with the use of common materials and recognizable environments. Another of the characteristics of his work is the presence of Marianela León in many of his pieces, a performer who has been collaborating with Fernando for many years until becoming almost an alter ego of himself and starring in most actions that take place in public spaces.

In this meeting, Fernando was able to explain part of his creative processes and to highlight a key aspect to the performance artist: to understand the reaction of the public. In this way, the impact of a work conceived from the theoretical plane is also analyzed, the meaning of which can completely change depending on the viewer's perception. As he himself explained in the talk regarding his piece "Balsa":

"What started out as a performance with an established script ended up being a happening in which the public participated with sometimes unusual reactions".

For his part, Mario Santamaría, who was with us on February 28th, shared with us a completely different work from Fernando's. This artist is focused on the analysis of the use of data, the feeling of manipulation and lack of control over our information that is produced in the digital medium and the desire to transform into something real some ideas as ethereal and commonplace today as the use of virtual storage clouds, the location of web pages or the data flow over the Internet. Much of his work, documented on video or transformed into technological facilities, is a form of research on the impact of the digital medium on our daily lives. His desire to bring these terms to the material plane, which we handle in our language today without really understanding their meaning, has led him to visit server bunkers, storage warehouses, in addition to tracking the exact location of the servers that host his own website to find isolated places far away from humanity.

Mario proposed a material trip to this reality to demonstrate that we are facing a very fragile system, whose durability is sensitive to natural phenomena, as evidenced by some of the documentation work carried out, where he rescued images of wild animals entering these data centres and endangering the livelihood of the digital world.

Mario Santamaría

Finally, Maia Navas, recently arrived from Argentina, shared with us the afternoon of Saturday 29th in a chat in which she told us about her creative work as well as her experience at the head of Play-Videoarte, a festival entirely dedicated to this discipline that she co-founded in 2012, and that in these six editions has combined an annual exhibition with a program of activities that take place in the City of Corrientes (Argentina), at the Cultural Centre of the University Extension that depends on the National University of the Northeast (UNNE).

Maia has a degree in psychology, as well as a degree in arts and technology, and combine her artistic career with teaching. The impact of psychology among her work topics is evident, and some of her video works try to delve into disturbing and perplexing aspects of human behaviour, such as the series "Procedures" that we could watch during the presentation. In it, the artist portrays the daily lives of people affected by OCD syndrome with an excellent visual narrative that puts the accent, almost with a cinematographic vision, on the personal experience of this phenomenon.

Maia Navas, foto de Marc Cisneros

From Art Madrid, we want to thank all these artists for sharing their creative experience with us and giving us the opportunity to dialogue with them about their present and future projects.