ARCOmadrid 2021
7 – 11 July 2021
Stand 9B16 | Ifema Pav. 9, Madrid, Spain
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils
André Romão
Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain
Carlos Bunga
Daniel Blaufuks
Gabriela Albergaria
Gonçalo Barreiros
Joana Escoval
João Louro
José Pedro Croft
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Perplex Series #03, 2020
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Portuguese visual artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils (b. 1987) has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with nonconventional tools and techniques, establishing symbolic reflections on identity, the relationship of interdependence between people and the surrounding environment, and life in contemporary urban societies, as well as the impact of development, the passage of time, and material transformation. Having begun to interact with the urban environment through the practice of graffiti in the early 2000s, Vhils has been hailed as one of the most innovative artists of his generation. His poignant, poetic portraits chiselled into flaking walls can be seen adorning cityscapes around the world. Based on his aesthetics of vandalism, Vhils destroys as a means to create. He carves, cuts, drills, etches and blasts his way through the layers of materials. Yet, like an archaeologist, he removes in order to expose, bringing to light the beauty that lies trapped beneath the surface of things.
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Residue Series #22, 2017/2021, Bas-relief carving on plasterboard mounted on metal structure, 200 x 120 x 40 cm
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils. Residue Series #33, 2019/2021. Bas-relief carving on plasterboard, mounted on metal structure. 200 x 120 x 4 cm
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils. Tear Series #10, 2021. Hand-carved advertising posters. 114 x 77 cm
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Tear Series #09, 2021. Hand-carved advertising posters. 113 x 84 cm
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Umbra Series #26, 2020
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André Romão lives and works in Lisbon. His practice has been dealing with the human aspects hiding in cultural and economical systems of production, exploring the confrontation of macro and micro structures in contemporary society through an ‘against the grain’ research on economics, eroticism, violence, and appropriation. André Romão’s works across sculpture and text to explore a territory where normal interactions be- tween bodies and entities are suspended or blur, at the border between human and animal and the natural and artificial. Romão’s work uses or appropriates materials in a speculative and poetic manner and is deeply rooted in the legacies of both Surrealism and the Baroque. André Romão is currently participating in the Liverpool Biennial 2021, The Stomach and the Port, curated by Manuela Moscoso.
André Romão, Demonic possession / Erotic self expression, 2020 . Sculptural fragment (plaster, England, 1980s), cut flowers and greenery. 120 x 40 x 28 cm
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André Romão, Demonic possession / Erotic self expression, 2020 (detail). Sculptural fragment (plaster, England, 1980s), cut flowers and greenery. 120 x 40 x 28 cm
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André Romão, Pé (bronze), 2020. Bronze, cut flowers, greenery. 20 x 25 x 13 cm
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André Romão, Alien kin II, 2020. Mussels, peacock feathers (plexiglas, hot glue)33 x 20 x 23 cm
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André Romão, Sunrise (Odontolabis Dakmani / John Chamberlain’s Scotch Vapour), 2017. Digital print on paper. 80 x 70 cm
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André Romão, Sunrise (Theodosia Rodiguezi / John Chamberlain’s Scotch Vapour), 2017. Digital print on paper. 80 x 70 c
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Angela Detanico (1974), Rafael Lain (1973) – Caxias do Sul, Brazil. Live and work in Paris. Respectively a linguist and a typographer, working within the themes of writing, reading and translation, from a media to another or from a code to another. Interested in the limits of the representation of time and space, the artists develop works crossing poetry, sound and image.
Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Constelações (Cassiopeia), 2017. Silver. Variable dimensions
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Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Constelações (Cassiopeia), 2017. Silver. Variable dimensions
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Carlos Bunga (b. 1976 Porto) creates process-oriented works in various formats: sculptures, paintings, drawings, performances, video, and above all in situ installations, that refer to and intervene in their immediate architectural surroundings. While often using ordinary, unassuming materials such as packing cardboard and adhesive tape, Bunga’s work involves a highly developed degree of aesthetic care and delicacy, as well as a conceptual complexity derived from the inter-relationship between doing and undoing, between unmaking and remaking, between the micro and the macro, between investigation and conclusion. Straddling the divide between sculpture and painting, Bunga’s deceptively delicate works are characterized by an intense study of the combination of color and materiality, while at the same time emphasize the performative aspect of the creative act. Bunga’s works on paper, which are closely related to his sculptures and installations, often involve overlays, whether of compositional elements in the paintings or sheets of translucent paper in the drawings. The analytic/descriptive result, like a photographic double-exposure, mimics the dual experience of memory and imagination underlying the sculpture.
Carlos Bunga, Moving Wall #3, 2021. Plants, latex and glue on wood and cardboard. 218 x 150 x 30 cm
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Carlos Bunga, Moving Wall #3, 2021. Plants, latex and glue on wood and cardboard. 218 x 150 x 30 cm
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Carlos Bunga, From the series Pensar a cidade desde a cozinha, 2021. 9 chromogenic color print. 9: 16,5 x 12 cm.
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Carlos Bunga, Free Standing Painting #28, 2018. Latex and glue on felt. 138 x 160 x 3 cm. Unique
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Carlos Bunga, Intersection Series #22, 2019. Acrylic on cardboard. 20 x 20 x 9 cm
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Daniel Blaufuks has been working on the relationship between public and private memory, one of the constant interrogations in his work as a visual artist. He has exhibited widely in museums, private galleries, and festivals and works mainly in photography and video, presenting his work through books, installations, and films.
Daniel Blaufuks, Perpetual camera, 2020. Mirror, laser engraving. Ø 100 x 0,3 cm
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Daniel Blaufuks, Cópia Original, 2020. Mirror, laser engraving. 29 x 21 cm
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Daniel Blaufuks, Original Copy, 2020. Mirror, laser engraving. 29 x 21 cm
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Daniel Blaufuks, Eternal Camera 1; 2, 2018. Polished mirror, graphite. 21,8 x 30,5 cm
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Gabriela Albergaria‘s work involves one territory: Nature. A nature manipulated, planted, transported, set in hierarchy, catalogued, studied, felt and recalled through the ongoing exploration of gardens in photography, drawing and sculpture. The artist views gardens as elaborated constructs, representational systems and descriptive mechanisms that epitomize a set of fictional beliefs that are employed to represent the natural world. Gardens are also environments dedicated to leisure and study, cultural and social processes that produce a historical understanding of what is knowledge and what is pleasure. More generally, the images of gardens and plant species employed by the artist are used as devices to reveal processes of cultural change through which visions of nature are produced. Mediated by representation systems they generate different versions of what we see as landscape—itself a complex system of material structures and visual hierarchies, cultural constructs that define the framing of our visual field.
Gabriela Albergaria, The Space Between #1, 2021. Inkjet print on rag, colour pencil on paper ( Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315gsm). 198 x 155 cm
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Gabriela Albergaria, Soquence 04-41-24, 2019/2021. Inkjet print on rag, colour pencil on paper (Heritage Woodfree Bookwhite 315gsm). 100 x 100 cm
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Since the beginning of his career, Gonçalo Barreiros has committed himself to sculpture. In his pieces, the dimensions of chance, time, disappointment, imperfection and imponderability shape a conception of sculpture as an unstable, uncertain realm. Sculpture is a possibility, a pause, an accident. Each piece is the outcome of a long process of creation and research, they are about time, they define a condition. Perhaps the most determining feature of his practice is the tendency to take the exhibition space as a stage and to make the pieces agents that are often disturbing, sarcastic, comic or exasperating. Using a wide variety of expedients and technical resources, the artist has produced a very diverse body of works, sometimes presenting extremely simple pieces, using a drawing, a sound, a noise, a word, a hum, or a metallic trill, but also the instability of a balance, a difference in scale or proportion, the absence of colour. Much of the singularity of Gonçalo Barreiros’ work seems to lie in the way in which he prepares the double movement that his works set in motion. Revealing a sophisticated domain of the mechanics of subversion, irony and incongruity, his works confront the spectator with his most intimate and inescapable reactions, and at the same time with the prejudices, censures and violence that govern many of our common values.
Gonçalo Barreiros, Untitled, 2021. Painted and polished Zincor.
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Gonçalo Barreiros, Untitled, 2021. Painted and polished Zincor.
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Joana Escoval’s works are passages, open-ended invisible paths. The rhythm and fluidity of the elements she uses in her work are temporarily suspended in time, and will eventually follow their natural transition and transmission into other states of matter, keeping their new-found charges and vibrations from when they were sculptures. Whichever form they’re found in (mostly metals compounded or purified, mixed as alloys or mixed with other materials), these elements are charged with energies that unite beings and objects, the material and the spiritual. Escoval blurs the borders between what we are so used to calling “nature” and “culture,” and emphasises instead how everything is entangled and connected, seeing “nature” and its cycles beyond a western point-of-view—and most of all seeing it as something that is not separate from us.
Joana Escoval, An empty list of things missing III, 2021 (detail). Steel, copper and vine. 65 x 80 x 63 cm (approx.). Unique
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Joana Escoval, An empty list of things missing III, 2021. Steel, copper and vine. 65 x 80 x 63 cm (approx.). Unique
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Joana Escoval, Each definition, a kind of death (VIII), 2018. Brass. Approx. 130 x 70 x 0,5 cm. Unique
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Joana Escoval, Using what you have to remember what you saw (III), 2018. Gold, glass. Approx. 70 x 12 x 14 cm. Unique
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João Louro’s work descends from minimal and conceptual art, with special attention to avant-garde movements of the early twentieth century. It draws out a topography of time, with references that are personal but mainly they are generational. With regular recourse to language as a source, as well as the written word, he seeks a review of the image in contemporary culture, starting out from a set of representations and symbols from the collective visual universe. Minimalism, conceptualism, Pop culture, structuralism and post-structuralism, authors such as Walter Benjamin, Guy Debord, Georges Bataille and Blanchot as well as artists like Donald Judd and the ever-present Duchamp, form the reference lexical universe of the artist.
João Louro, Matriz #01, 2020. Lacquered MDF. 144 x 220 cm
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João Louro, História do Crime #A (Poder), 2019. Photographic print. 24,5 x 29 cm
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João Louro, História do Crime #B (Direito), 2019. Photographic print. 24,5 x 29 cm
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João Louro, História do Crime #C (Corrupção), 2019. Photographic print. 24,5 x 29 cm
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João Louro, História do Crime #D (Democracia), 2019. Photographic print. 24,5 x 29 cm
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José Pedro Croft is considered one of the primary forces behind the revival of Portuguese sculpture that began in the 1980s. Croft, who represented Portugal in the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017, is widely known for his pared-down geometric sculptures and paintings. The sculptures are often made of industrious materials, like wood and metal, and frequently feature glass and mirrored surfaces. Croft is also known for his application of vibrantly colored paints and his play with light, shadow, and color in ways that give his sculptures an architectural dimension, creating tension between the works and the spaces in which they are displayed. Today Croft’s work can be found in the collections of several museums, including France’s Centre Pompidou, Spain’s Museo Reina Sofía, and Brazil’s Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo and Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro.
José Pedro Croft, Untitled, 2021. Graphite, varnish, vinyl ink, china ink and collage on paper. 153 x 275 cm
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José Pedro Croft, Untitled, 2020. Gouache, varnish and Indian ink on paper. 160 x 120 cm
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José Pedro Croft, Untitled, 2020. Iron and plaster. 178 x 120 x 72 cm
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José Pedro Croft, Untitled, 2021. Graphite, varnish, vinyl ink, china ink, charcoal and collage on paper. 153 x 275 cm
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José Pedro Croft, Untitled, 2020. Synthetic varnish, Indian ink, gouache and graphite. 153 x 197 cm
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