ARCOmadrid 2023
22 – 26 February
Stand 9C14 | Ifema Pav. 9, Madrid
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils
André Romão
Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain
Carlos Bunga
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros
Daniel Blaufuks
Gonçalo Barreiros
Joana Escoval
John Wood and Paul Harrison
ALEXANDRE FARTO AKA VHILS
Portuguese visual artist Alexandre Farto aka Vhils has developed a unique visual language based on the removal of the surface layers of walls and other media with non-conventional 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.
_ Artist bio
Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Glimmer series #02, 2022. Water jet cut Corian, assembled by hand, led lights. 79,5 x 53,5 x 17 cm. Unique
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Glimmer series #02, 2022. Water jet cut Corian, assembled by hand, led lights. 79,5 x 53,5 x 17 cm. Unique
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Glimmer series #03, 2022. Water jet cut Corian, assembled by hand, led lights. 79,5 x 53,5 x 17 cm. Unique
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Glimmer series #03, 2022. Water jet cut Corian, assembled by hand, led lights. 79,5 x 53,5 x 17 cm. Unique
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Glimmer series #03, 2022. Water jet cut Corian, assembled by hand, led lights. 79,5 x 53,5 x 17 cm. Unique
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Alexandre Farto aka Vhils, Atomizer Series #24, 2022. Advertising posters, spray paint, glue, crystal epoxy. 150 x 120 cm. Unique
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ANDRÉ ROMÃO
André Romão’s practice deals with the human aspects hiding in cultural and economic 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.
_ Artist bio
André Romão, Sign, 2023. Plaster, wood, electrical components, light bulbs. 60 x 20 x 25 cm. Unique
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André Romão, A touch of the fox / Sunambulo, 2022. Prosthetic eyes (glass, India, late 1900’s), terra cruda, wood. 20 × 16 × 16 cm. Unique
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“The sun set. The night fell but with it came no sleep. Or maybe it did and I just didn’t notice, I’m not always sure to be fully awake. The moon rises and out come foxes and ghosts, or so say most of the books I read. And with them restless nights begin. Plants, animals and ghosts come out to dance. They dance with or within my dreams, thoughts and hallucinations. It is not up to me to decide their paths and their ways, and that pleases me. A lot of what I do has to do with this lack of control.” – André Romão
_ Solo exhibition, Noite (Galeria Vera Cortês, 2022)
ANGELA DETANICO / RAFAEL LAIN
Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Red (Cantos), 2023. Painted wood, 4 elements. 110 x 110 x 3,5 cm. Unique
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Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Green (Cantos), 2023. Painted wood, 4 elements. 120 x 120 x 3,5 cm. Unique
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Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Blue (Cantos), 2023. Painted wood, 4 elements. 125 x 120 x 3,5 cm. Unique
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Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Surpresa, 2010-2022. Cut-out aluminium, bas-relief engraving. 179 x 32 cm. Unique
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Interested in the limits of the representation of time and space, Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain’ works cross poetry, sound and image. The fact that they studied semiotics and graphic design, respectively, is not a far stretch from the work they have created together since 1996. It was mainly after Utopia (2001) that their work began a process of transcodification, developed widely in the works that followed and that consisted in the correspondence between the letters of the Roman alphabet and two series of drawings: one that alluded to Oscar Niemeyer’s modernist architecture, and another that alluded to elements of an urban practice. The images verbally combined established complex meanings between text and image using a sentence of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
_ Artists bio
Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Consciousness, 2022. Pigment inkjet print on paper (Kozo Thick White 110g). 60 x 110 cm. Unique
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CARLOS BUNGA
Through the employment of mass-produced materials, Carlos Bunga establishes a dialogue with the existing architectural spaces resulting in ephemeral structures creating a double effect: to rethink our experience in relation with the space itself, as well as arousing the transient and delicate nature of urban structures.
_ Artist bio
Carlos Bunga, Silla castigada, 2019. Latex and glue on cardboard and wood. 77 x 46 x 54 cm. Unique
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Starting from pictorial research, Bunga has developed a personal language that deconstructs the discipline of painting, hybridizing elements of sculpture, architecture, installation, video and performance. His expanded paintings slide across floors and walls; tensing the limits of the work, rethinking its supports and surfaces, spreading the works to other physical and conceptual places, and materializing in installation constructions that become performative spaces. His works, marked by a poetic approach to forms, are translated into geometric and abstract paintings, made by means of everyday materials such as cardboard sheets or adhesive tape, and sometimes introducing found natural elements: branches and leaves that intertwine and dilute in his compositions, integrating into a single material object that subtly leads us to question our own position in the world. — Sandra Guimarães
_ Performing Nature, Carlos Bunga’s solo exhibition at Bombas Gens, Valencia (Spain)
Carlos Bunga, Alfombra #1, 2022 (detail). Latex and glue on fabric. 190 x 290 cm. Unique
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Carlos Bunga, Linha (vertical), 2017 (2023). Latex and glue on carboard and wall. Unique
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Carlos Bunga, Alfombra #2, 2022. Latex and glue on fabric. 60 x 110 cm. Unique
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Carlos Bunga, Before the White Cube, 2023. Acrylic on wood. 15 x 20,5 x 4 cm
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Carlos Bunga, Before the White Cube, 2023. Acrylic on wood. 15 x 20,5 x 4 cm
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CHARBEL-JOSEPH H. BOUTROS
In Charbel-joseph H. Boutros’ work invisibility is charged with intimate, geographical and historical layers; finding poetic lines that extend beyond the realm of existing speculations and realities. Being born in the middle of the Lebanese war, his art is not engaged in an explicit political and historical reflection, but is more accurately haunted by the said political and historical reflection. For H. Boutros, each exhibition is a new geography that reformulates reality.
H. Boutros was a resident at Le Pavillon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (France) and was a researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht (The Netherlands). His first extensive institutional exhibition in Europe, “The Sun Is My Only Ally” was recently shown at S.M.A.K. Museum, Ghent (Belgium). His first monograph released in 2022 was published by Mousse Publishing.
His work has been shown internationally at: The 12th International Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey; Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France; Punta della Dogana, Venice, Italy; Centre Pompidou – Metz, France; S.M.A.K. Museum, Gent, Belgium; Home Works 8, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut; CCS Bard College, New York, USA; 3rd Bahia Biennial, Salvador, Brazil; 1st Yinchuan Biennale, Yinchuan, China; CCA, Warsaw, Poland; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE; Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon; La Criée Centre for Contemporary Art, France; Marres, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
A permanent installation ‘Sueur d’étoile’, that he realized with the French étoile dancer Marie-Agnes Gillot, inaugurated in 2016 remains on view at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (France).
His works are in the collections of S.M.A.K. Museum, Gent; CNAP, Paris, France; Barjeel Art Foundation, Sharjah, UAE.
_ Artist bio
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, A mixed-up dream #5, 2019-2023. Havaianas, neon light. Ed. 2 + 2 AP
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Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Pleasure, 2019. Cut from an exhibition rug, votive candle wax, hopes, wishes. 80 x 65 cm. Unique
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Charbel-joseph H. Boutros, Night Cartography #3, 2016-19. Airplane sleeping mask, votive candle wax, dreams, wishes. Ongoing series
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DANIEL BLAUFUKS
Daniel Blaufuks, THE MORNING AFTER, 2023. Inkjet print on baryta paper. 120 x 160 cm. Ed. 3 + 2 AP
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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. He holds a PhD from the University of Wales, where he wrote on photography and film in relation to the work of W.G. Sebald and Georges Perec, as well in relation to memory and the Holocaust. In 2016 he received the AICA Portugal award for the exhibitions Attempting Exhaustion and Léxico.
_ Artist bio
Daniel Blaufuks, IMPRESSION, SUNRISE, 2023. Inkjet print on baryta paper. 120 x 160 cm. Ed. 3 + 2 AP
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GONÇALO BARREIROS
From the start 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. 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…
Gonçalo Barreiros, Untitled, 2016. Painted stainless steel. 110 x 169 x 202 cm. Unique
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Much of the singularity of Gonçalo Barreiros’ work lies 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.
_ Artist bio
Gonçalo Barreiros, Untitled, 2015. Plastic bag and lead. 120 x 80 cm. Unique
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JOANA ESCOVAL
Joana Escoval, Subtle vital function of the bodies, 2023 (detail). Brass, grapevine branch. 123 x 96 x 51 cm. Unique
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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.
_ Artist bio
Joana Escoval, Subtle vital function of the bodies, 2023. Brass, grapevine branch. 123 x 96 x 51 cm. Unique
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Joana Escoval, Hair Paintings II, 2023. Acrylic on linen. 2 x (23 x 14 x 2,5 cm). Unique
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Joana Escoval, Peripheral body energy, 2023. Brass. 166 x 38 x 41 cm. Unique
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Joana Escoval, Peripheral body energy, 2023. Brass. 166 x 38 x 41 cm. Unique
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JOHN WOOD AND PAUL HARRISON
John Wood and Paul Harrison, A, 2021. Oil paint on plywood panel. 91 x 61 cm. Unique
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John Wood and Paul Harrison make things that move and things that don’t, things that are flat and things that are not, things that are mildly amusing and things that are definitely not. They make works that form a kind of reference manual for how to do, make, build, or draw things that you probably never want to do, make, build, or draw. They do it for you. Even though you don’t need them to. This attempt to compile an encyclopaedia of the everyday, started in 1993 after they met at art college.
_ Artists bio
John Wood and Paul Harrison, A painting made of thirty three letters, 2021. Oil paint on plywood panel. 91 x 61 cm. Unique
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John Wood and Paul Harrison, Blue plastic chair 2, 2016. Permanent marker on paper. 100 × 70 cm
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John Wood and Paul Harrison, Orange plastic chair, 2016. Permanent marker on paper. 100 × 70 cm
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Current exhibition at GALERIA VERA CORTÊS:
Panorama
DANIEL BLAUFUKS
12 January – 25 February 2023
_ Online Viewing Room
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Save the date:
I stood in the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar and I dropped my left tear in the Atlantic Ocean and my right tear in the Mediterranean Sea.
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros
Opening Thursday 9 March, 6-9pm
9 March – 29 April 2023
Charbel-joseph H. Boutros. I stood in the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar and I dropped my left tear in the Atlantic Ocean and my right tear in the Mediterranean Sea.
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