Art Madrid'26 – THE EXPECTED ONE PROJECT OF ART MADRID 17

 

Curated by Carlos Delgado Mayordomo, the proposal talks about concepts as territory, displacement and identity. The selection includes these artists: Rubén Martín de Lucas, Mariajosé Gallardo, Irene Cruz, Renato Costa, Acaymo S. Cuesta, Keke Vilabelda, Eloy Arribas and Ernesto Rancaño.

 

Rubén Martín de Lucas. Genesis 1.28. Creced and Multiplied. Circles Action in the landscape. Photography. Pigmented inks on siliconized microporous paper on 3mm methacrylate mounted on dibond. 120 x 150 cm. Ed.5 + PA. 2017

 

Rubén Martín de Lucas (Madrid, 1977) with the BAT gallery Alberto Cornejo (Madrid), Engineer studies by the Polytechnic University of Madrid but declines to exercise the engineering to dedicate itself completely to art. Member of the multidisciplinary group Boa Mistura, group of artists with roots in graffiti that has intervened among others in the National Museum of Art Reina Sofía, Casa Encendida, International Festival of Arts of Castilla Leon.

 

The main obsession of the artist it is to reduce the forms to the essential, emphasizing the expressive force of graphics, fragments of collages or of the big planes, conceived as zones that allow to concentrate the information of the art piece that should reach the viewer. His works are not simple photographs because he modifies them by painting on them with oil or by creating collages with different images.

 

 

Mariajosé Gallardo. Painting cost time and money - Oil, enamel and gold leaf on canvas - 100 x 81 cm - 2016

 

 

Mariajosé Gallardo (Villaf. De los Barros, Badajoz, 1978), participates with Espacio Olvera (Seville). Graduate in Fine Arts in the specialty of Design and Engraving, by the University of Seville. We can highlight awards such as the Focus Abengoa, the presence of her work in numerous foundations or her individual exhibition in the CAAC (Andalusian Center for Contemporary Art).

 

Throughout her different projects, Mariajosé Gallardo, has built her own plastic vocabulary and has made her works easily recognizable. In its representative lexicon are always present emblems, symbols, religious motives, esoteric, heraldry, ex-votos or reliquaries; she offers the possibility of thinking the painting from different parameters not only by the strictly plastic or aesthetic point of view.
 

 

 

 Irene Cruz. The Muses - Photograph - 40 x 60 cm - 2016

 

 

Irene Cruz (Madrid, 1987) with the gallery Fifty Dots Gallery (Barcelona), an artist very recognized in the contemporary artistic world. Degree in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid in Advertising and Public Relations and Audiovisual Communication. She obtained the International Master EFTI, specializing in Conceptual photography and artistic creation. She currently lives and works in Berlin, and she has made more than 250 photography exhibitions, video art and video installations around the world, highlighting such places as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the BB.AA Circle in Madrid and the New York Art Project Art Space.

 

 

Renato Costa. Tan-Gentes -  Oil on canvas - 140 x 140 cm - 2016

   

 

Renato Costa (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 1974) that participates with Javier Silva Gallery (Valladolid) He began his profession in his father ?attelier. After graduated with a degree in Fine Arts in University Complutense of Madrid, he moved to that city until the present time. His work is defined by expressing intensely the emotions through its technical and thematic characteristics. The key issues are the relationship between the past and the present, not only the personal but also the collective. Figuration, subjectivity and open emotions, converging in his work into a more conceptual art.

 

 

Acaymo S.Cuesta. Preámbulo - Photographed on photopolymer plate. Black offset ink. Super alpha paper. Polyptych composed of 7 engravings
   

 

Acaymo S.Cuesta (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 1983) with the La Isla Gallery (Madrid). Graduate in Fine Arts, studied the Master of Artistic Production. He has exhibited individually in the Gallery No Place of Quito, Ecuador, the Gallery of Art U.L.P.G.C of Las Palmas of Gran Canaria and in Foundation Mapfre of Tenerife. He has participated in collective exhibitions in T.E.A. (Tenerife Spaces of the Arts), in Camino Largo 31, La Laguna, Tenerife, Estudio Andrés Delgado, Madrid, in San Miguel de Tucumán, Argentina and at the School of Design of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, among others.

 

 

Keke Vilabelda. Bone and concrete 4 - - 100 x 70 cm - 2016

 

 

Keke Vilabelda (Valencia, 1986) participant with Kir Royal Gallery (Madrid). Graduated in Fine Arts at the Polytechnic University of San Carlos, Valencia. He has exhibited individually in galleries such as the Kir Royal Gallery in Valencia, the Rodríguez Gallery in Poland, Plecto Gallery and Contemporary Lokus in Medellín, or the Coldharbour London Gallery in London. He has also participated in collective exhibitions such as, “Injuve with the young creation” in the Sala Amadis, Madrid. “Languages in Paper” at the Fernando Pradilla Gallery or the Beautiful New World, International Contemporary Art Exhibition, Nanjin.

 

 

Eloy Arribas. Sin título - Oil and collage on canvas - 100 x 81 cm - 2016  

 

 

Eloy Arribas (Valladolid, 1991) with Silves Arte Contemporáneo (Huércal-Overa, Almería) Painting, he finished his training with a Master’s Degree in Teacher Training. He has exhibited individually in Salamanca in the Space 3K Art and DA2, in Almería in the Gallery Mojácar Factory and in Valladolid in the Gallery Javier Silva. He is currently planning two other exhibitions, one in Madrid. She has participated in a large number of collective exhibitions such as “Flashes” at the Cultural Center of La Carolina, Jaén, and in “Open Studio” with Mabel Esteban and Brin Magenta at Escorpión Producciones, Salamanca.

 

 

 Ernesto Rancaño. Sombras del ayer - Mixed media (Light boxes) - 35 x 6 cm - 2016

 

 

Ernesto Rancaño (Havana, Cuba, 1968) participates with South Border Gallery (Beirut, Lebanon). He studied at the National School of Plastic Arts from 1987 to 1991, where he graduated in the specialty of Painting and Drawing. He obtained the First Prize in the Contest of Posters sponsored and summoned by the CETSS, Havana, Cuba. His works are in permanent collections in Panama, Mexico, Jamaica and Spain. Also, he has participated in numerous collective exhibitions. Since 1995 he has been a member of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). Some of his individual exhibitions are “Karma” at the Cuba Pavilion in Havana or “Half of my life” in 2012.

 

 

 

Daniel Barrio. Guest artist of the third edition of OPEN BOOTH. Courtesy of the artist.


DESPIECE. PROTOCOLO DE MUTACIÓN


As part of the Art Madrid’26 Parallel Program, we present the third edition of Open Booth, a space conceived as a platform for artistic creation and contemporary experimentation. The initiative focuses on artists who do not yet have representation within the gallery circuit, offering a high-visibility professional context in which new voices can develop their practice, explore forms of engagement with audiences, and consolidate their presence within the current art scene. On this occasion, the project features artist Daniel Barrio (Cuba, 1988), who presents the site-specific work Despiece. Protocolo de mutación.

Daniel Barrio’s practice focuses on painting as a space for experimentation, from which he explores the commodification of social life and the tyranny of media approval. He works with images drawn from the press and other media, intervening in them pictorially to disrupt their original meaning. Through this process, the artist opens up new readings and questions how meaning is produced, approaching painting as a space of realization, therapy, and catharsis.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación is built from urban remnants, industrial materials, and fragments of history, inviting us to reflect on which memories we inherit, which we consume, and which ones we are capable of creating. Floors, walls, and volumes come together to form a landscape under tension, where the sacred coexists with the everyday, and where cracks matter more than perfection.

The constant evolution of art calls for ongoing exchange between artists, institutions, and audiences. In its 21st edition, Art Madrid reaffirms its commitment to acting as a catalyst for this dialogue, expanding the traditional boundaries of the art fair context and opening up new possibilities of visibility for emerging practices.



Despiece. Protocolo de mutación emerges from a critical and affective impulse to dismantle, examine, and reassemble what shapes us culturally and personally. The work is conceived as an inseparable whole: an inner landscape that operates as a device of suspicion, where floors, walls, and volumes configure an ecosystem of remnants. It proposes a reading of history not as a linear continuity, but as a system of forces in permanent friction, articulating space as an altered archive—a surface that presents itself as definitive while remaining in constant transformation.



The work takes shape as a landscape constructed from urban waste, where floors, walls, and objects form a unified body made of lime mortar, PVC from theatrical signage, industrial foam, and offering wax. At the core of the project is an L-shaped structure measuring 5 × 3 meters, which reinterprets the fresco technique on reclaimed industrial supports. The mortar is applied wet over continuous working days, without a pursuit of perfection, allowing the material to reveal its own character. Orbiting this structure are architectural fragments: foam blocks that simulate concrete, a 3D-printed and distorted Belvedere torso, and a wax sculptural element embedded with sandpaper used by anonymous workers and artists, preserving the labor of those other bodies.

A white wax sculptural element functions within the installation as a point of sensory concentration that challenges the gaze. Inside it converge the accumulated faith of offering candles and the industrial residues of the studio, recalling that purity and devotion coexist with the materiality of everyday life. The viewer’s experience thus moves beyond the visual: bending down, smelling, and approaching its vulnerability transforms perception into an intimate, embodied act. Embedded within its density are sanding blocks used by artists, artisans, and laborers, recovered from other contexts, where the sandpaper operates as a trace of the effort of other bodies, following a protocol of registration with no autobiographical intent.

Despiece. Protocolo de mutación addresses us directly, asking: which memory do we value—the one we consume, or the one we construct with rigor? The audience leaves behind a purely contemplative position to become part of the system, as the effort of moving matter, documentary rigor, and immersive materiality form a body of resistance against a mediated reality. The project thus takes shape as an inner landscape, where floor, surface, and volume articulate an anatomy of residues. Adulteration operates as an analytical methodology applied to the layers of urban reality, intervening in history through theatrical and street advertising, architectural remnants, and administrative protocols, proposing that art can restore the capacity to build one’s own memory, even if inevitably fragmented.



ABOUT THE ARTIST

DANIEL BARRIO (1988, Cuba)

Daniel Barrio (Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1988) is a visual artist whose practice articulates space through painting, understanding the environment as an altered archive open to critical intervention. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts of Cienfuegos (2004–2008), specializing in painting, and later at the Madrid Film School (ECAM, 2012–2015), where he studied Art Direction. His methodology integrates visual thinking with scenographic narrative.

His trajectory includes solo exhibitions such as La levedad en lo cotidiano (Galería María Porto, Madrid, 2023), Interiores ajenos (PlusArtis, Madrid, 2022), and Tribud (Navel Art, Madrid, 2019), as well as significant group exhibitions including Space is the Landscape (Estudio Show, Madrid, 2024), Winterlinch (Espacio Valverde Gallery, Madrid, 2024), Hiberia (Galería María Porto, Lisbon, 2023), and the traveling exhibition of the La Rioja Young Art Exhibition (2022).

A member of the Resiliencia Collective, his work does not pursue the production of objects but rather the articulation of pictorial devices that generate protocols of resistance against the flow of disposable images. In a context saturated with immediate data, his practice produces traces and archives what must endure, questioning not the meaning of the work itself but the memory the viewer constructs through interaction—thus reclaiming sovereignty over the gaze and inhabiting ruins as a method for understanding the present.