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PT ARCOmadrid, 2025
José Bedia - Los Bravú - Ariamna Contino - Roberto Diago - Leandro Feal - Diana Fonseca - Alex Hernández y Ariamna Contino - Miki Leal - Eduardo Ponjuán - Reynier Leyva Novo
March 6 - 10, 2025
IFEMA, Booth 9A10, Madrid, Spain
In this edition of ARCOmadrid we wanted to explore, through a selection of works by Hispanic American artists, the ductility of a concept such as identity. Imaginaries from one side and the other of the Atlantic converge to oxygenate the spheres of collective reflection of contemporary societies interwoven today in that increasingly intense connection existing between Latin American Art, art made by Latin American artists in the Diaspora and Spanish Art.
Wayom Lemond, 2024
Mixed on amate paper
236 x 120 cm (92.9 x 47.2 in) (without frame)
For the last few years, I have been involved in a project on the Haitian Revolution. My work is mainly based on content and everything related to history and mythology, as well as the religions of the Caribbean, America and Africa, which interest me deeply in a very particular way. As a Caribbean artist, interested in our common heritage and histories, my first approach was to recreate the personal story of Jose Aponte. Aponte was a black carpenter in Cuba in the early 19th century, who conceived a revolutionary project for independence (which failed) against the Spanish colonial government (as a result he was executed). I then focused on Haiti's mythical national hero, Mackandal, who was also executed, in this case by the French colonial government. Mackandal was the initiator of the Haitian independence movement, which as we now know, was the first black independence movement not only in the Caribbean, but in the world. In this case, I set out to illustrate in multiple ways the suggestive images of the novel "The Kingdom of this World" written by the Cuban-French author - Alejo Carpentier. The story is so fascinating and so rich in details and specific moments, that it has allowed me to make a whole series related to the life, rebellion and execution of this Haitian historical hero. As you can see, the drawings try to be as succinct and simple as possible in terms of color (they illustrate black silhouettes) done on large scale handmade paper. I also incorporate multiple religious elements of Haitian religious practices, as well as many texts (incorporated as calligraphy) again related to the various Haitian religious practices (Voodoo, Petwo and Bisango), as well as the use of the Creole language. My ultimate goal is not only to recreate a historical moment, but also to draw attention to the unjust political and social situation that exists today in Haiti, considering its glorious past. In a way, I feel empathy and a duty to the Haitian people and my many Haitian friends who tell me of their hardships in their current situation. It is also my duty as a fellow Caribbean compatriot to bring to light not only my country, but similar origins."
Catching the breeze, coniferous forest, 2025
Hand-embossed paper Fabriano card stock 300 g, acid-free
153 x 158 cm (60.2 x 62.2 in)
Ariamna Contino builds her works based on the ritualistic and extremely meticulous technique of "openwork paper". Such a procedure contrasts with the themes she deals with, almost always anchored in controversial and highly topical phenomena. Ariamna develops a special interest in historical, environmental and socio-cultural issues, which is why she adopts an inquiring gaze on ongoing conflicts and phenomena that require constant revisions. From the data she collects in her research, she composes her own visual narratives on issues such as drug trafficking in Latin America, narco-aesthetics, the underground economy in Cuba, the trade of classified information, etc. Recently, Contino's work has begun to focus on the interstitial zones between the natural and cultural worlds. From there, he ventures new approaches to national identity and constructs other physiognomies for insularity.
Soma e cinza do teu mar, 2025
Satin quilting and gouache on canvas
100 x 80 cm (39.4 x 31.5 in)
Dea Gómez and Diego Omil have been working together since 2012 under the name "Los Bravú", a Galician term used to refer to the smell of animals. They have ventured into different media: comics, drawing, ceramics, painting, sculpture and installation. Their peculiar figurative pictorial language, flavored with slightly surrealist fantasies and a neo-Mannerist virtuosity, stands out for its methodical use of collage and fusion. The duo incorporates elements of contemporary design, fanzines, mass media and an academic aesthetic reminiscent of the masters of the Italian Renaissance (15th and 16th centuries) and magical realism (first half of the 20th century). They also mix different ways of painting in the same painting, so that each element in their pieces possesses a non-transferable identity crossed by urban and vernacular culture, by fascination and irony.
This recent body of work arises from the artists' encounter with a collection of six poems written by Lorca in Galician, a sort of literary rara avis. Each work is connected to a lyrical image drawn from these poems. On a technical level, the quilted work on satin is the result of the artists' collaboration with a group of craftswomen seamstresses from the north of Spain.
From the series I live in you (1), 2024
Bronze, fabric and wood
58 x 46 x 27 cm (22.8 x 18.1 x 10.6 in)
Roberto Diago examines the condition of the Cuban Afro-descendant in the social territory of the Revolution. His cultural and sociological vision fully understands the effects of colonial processes in the nations that suffered them. These traces are visible in the levels of marginalization and segregation as well as in the epistemic and linguistic levels.
Diago denounces, exposes and develops exercises of cultural resistance that allow him to speak from a self-conscious and maroon otherness, claiming other religious belongings, other canons of beauty and other views on the white world that inhabits the West.
Caribbean, from the series Green Havana, 2020-2022
Digital print on Photo Rag Ultrasmooth, 310 g /B&W photo negative green toning
150 x 150 cm (59 x 59 in)
Green Havana is a photographic series born in the period of the collective enclosure 2020-2021, a moment in which physical stagnation led us to look inward and activated our imagination. The series speaks of the possibility of a vintage and contemporary Havana; surreal and dreamlike, recreating the past to build the future. This green suggests the range of black and white television sets of the Caribe brand, produced in the Soviet Union and assembled in Cuba, which were part of the learning and audiovisual reference of every Cuban born in the second half of the twentieth century. The images in Green Havana are photographs that resist being monochromatic, like the Caribe television sets, whose screens some Cuban families painted in color to trick that b/w vision and create some chromatic effect. Feal's Havana is also like that. A Havana where the past is always present, a city that is stuck in time and needs to invert its colors to see it in a different way or that he continually finds in other cities of the world such as Berlin, Barcelona or Los Angeles. In the end, it all depends on the color of the glass you look through.
From the series Temptation Consummation, 2025
Diptych / Matches on wood
155 x 155 cm (61 x 61 in) each
Diana Fonseca is an artist devoted to the dismantling, almost obsessive, of the simple things and everyday events that surround her. Perhaps because of this, or due to the lyrical propensity of her work, she captures varied images of reality and interconnects them from discourses that speak of contemporary life and its visual saturation, of emptiness and banality, of the light and the endearing. From a position close to that of a film editor, Fonseca's work operates as a collage, a kind of palimpsestic mosaic where reality and fiction go hand in hand. For her, it is essential to question our perceptual mechanisms (why we see what we see) and the way in which discourses about the real are elaborated (why we say what we say). Based on these principles, Diana approaches, without fear, to minimalist aesthetics, to the notion of the unfinished, to the manufacture and simplicity of visualities that emphasize gesturality as opposed to the forcefulness of totalizing narratives.
Total mapping, Annual evolution of forest fires Spain, 2025
Hand-embossed paper / CansonMontval 300 g and Fabriano acid-free card stock
153 x 203 cm (60.2 x 79.9 in)
Annual evolution of forest fires in Spain from 2012 to 2022. Spain from 2012 to 2022. Types of agricultural landscapes by geographic area. geographical area. Average precipitation values values in 2024 by community.
The working methodology we apply in our most recent works derives from transposing elements of science to the field of art. We are obsessed with fundamental questions for the development of contemporary societies: the environmental health of the planet, the balance of social formations, movement and the dissimilar dynamics of the human being, among others. Statistics play a decisive role in our research. In many cases our starting point is a certain statistical source; but in the latest artistic experiences we have developed field work and generated our own statistics, the result of our own observation. These statistics then shape the works and determine them formally and conceptually. A global vision of our works can reflect the peculiar way in which we conceive them: as a landscape (we refer here exactly to the concept outlined by the theorist Rosalind Krauss when talking about expanded sculpture). For us our landscapes are, in reality, an exercise of total cartography, in which the documentation and/or physical and symbolic record of certain biopsychosocial events prevail.