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MACO
Mexico City
Author: Santiago Espinosa de los Monteros
ArtNexus No. 57 - Jun 2005
|  | With more than fifty participating galleries and almost thirty publishers of specialized magazines and cultural institutions, the third edition of MACO (Mexico Arte Contemporáneo) was held, for the second consecutive year, in the spaces of Expo Reforma, in the heart of Mexico City. More than 18,000 people, 4,000 more than last year according to estimates by the event’s organizers, visited the site over a period of three days.
Among the comments heard by gallery representatives was the fact that they had good sales (in some cases, only slightly higher than last year’s) and that the event’s organization was substantially enhanced. Thus, we found establishments that for the 2004 version had participated with far fewer pieces; Galería de Arte Mexicano and OMR were particularly notable in this regard.
The latter, for example, presented a wide panoramic of almost three generations of creators, with authors with a long trajectory such as Yvonne Domege, Alberto Gironella, Adolfo Riestra, alongside other in mid-career like Diego Toledo, Rocío Maldonado, Cisco Jiménez, Mónica Castillo, Rubén Ortiz Torres, and Mauricio Alejo. Among the emergent figures we can mention Gabriel Acevedo and Iñaqui Bonillas, who have already presented, in this same gallery, important works. The work of Daniel Lezama, undoubtedly one of the strongest voices in the contemporary pictorial realm, deserves mention as well.
On its part, the presence of Kurimanzutto gallery, although with fewer works than last year, continues to be of capital importance, as it has maintained a current profile and the creators it represents have an intense international presence. Eduardo Abaroa, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Gabriel Kuri, and of course Gabriel Orozco are some of the best known.
Among those galleries participating for the first time was Conner Contemporary Art, from Washington, which was able to place almost the totality of its pieces. Some of the stars in this space were the work of painter Eric Sandberg and of Leo Villarreal. Leight Conner, the space’s director, offered good prospect for their participation in subsequent editions.
Madrid’s La Caja Negra came with important works by established artists like Jan Hendrix, Félix Curto, Liliana Porter, and Richard Serra, to whom gallerist Fernando Cordero de la Lastra added the work of Jonathan Hernández Piché, who presented material from his project Vulnerabilidad. Taking advantage of its Mexican sojourn, La Caja Negra presented, a few days after the fair closed, Felix Curto’s Carros and El Triunfo, in the space of Tabasco street 295, works that were not seen at MACO. “I continue to believe that Mexico City is an ideal place to become the main fair in the Latin American scene. It has all the ingredients of a big city as a place of strong artistic creativity,” Cordero de la Lastra said. 1
Madrid’s Luis Adelantado Gallery was one of the most attractive for visitors, essentially thanks to Alex Frances’ piece, Zarajo, placed in one of the booth’s side walls, and to Gabriel de la Mora, who approaches drawing done using the hairs of those people found in the piece. His work, of a misleading simplicity, creates a kind of reflexive space between the gaze of selected characters and of the author, to which a third one is added, that of sculpture, which in turn has a reference (the mirror of the volumetric that finds its pair in the two-dimensional) with what is being drawn.
The work of De la Mora, characterized by its complex internal networks, was undoubtedly among the most widely commented in this version of MACO. Luis Adelantado presented this series of hair at Miami Basel, ARCO 05, and now at MACO, for the first time in this country. The work of this author sold in its totality to collectors from Mexico, Colombia, Miami, New York, Brazil, and Spain. Interestingly, a piece that has been widely cited and which Collectors have accepted without hesitation, was rejected for the recent edition of the Rufino Tamayo Biennial.
Myto Gallery, with Gonzalo Méndez at the helm, offered the public works from its traditional roster, like Ángel Ricardo Ríos, Yunior Mariño, and Lisbeth Fernández, but the surprise was Gabriel Orozco, who shares with his father some works that come to us as photographic registries of actions. Perhaps the most impressive is one in which the artist has transformed himself into a flag; tied to the top of a mast, his body, trained with great discipline for this work, is perfectly horizontal, supported by the arms, flapping in the air.
Tercerunquinto 2 (Julio Castro, Gabriel Cázares, and Rolando Flores,) perhaps one of the more interesting collectives of the last five years, originated in the northern city of Monterrey, was present at Nina Menocal with a vast series of small-format project drawings referred to actions. This group has reformulated the meaning of the sculptural/urban, creating pieces for public spaces with an inquisitorial avocation. The two-meter widening of a planted median in Calle de las Vizcaínas, in the city’s historic center, bespeaks of the need to expand pedestrian spaces in a city whose inhabitants exist in pernicious overpopulation. Although ephemeral, the piece emphasizes that which we lack, in this case, green areas that disappear under cement.
From Colombia, Quinta Galería came with two authors equally interesting, although formal and thematically distant from one another: Hugo Zapata and Jesús Abad Colorado. The former, an sculptor of impeccable craft who invites all who approaches his pieces to run their hand over the almost imperceptible connective seams of the stone and other materials; the elegance of lutite coexisting with water was present in abundance. The former, a photographer who confronts contemporary Colombia, filled with wounded landscapes and people in exodus, with great dignity. As he has said, “...I learned to take photographs that did not offer a spectacle, that were not sensationalistic regarding what is happening, photographs that bore witness and served as memory of reality...” 3
Another gallery that literally captured its public was Berlin’s Arndt & Partner. Visitors stopped and devoted long minutes to reading the panels that comprise Exquisite Pain, Sophie Calle’s large piece. Thomas Hirschhorn, as well as Douglas Kolk’s, with strong references to the work of Latin American artists, made clear the striving presence of this space that for over ten years has been one of the unavoidable points of reference in contemporary European art.
Zack Pospieszynski, director of Toronto-based Peak Gallery Ltd., brought Lyn Carter from among the authors in its roster. Carter’s impressive objectual works on canvas simulate in some cases a shirt, as in Two (lung) and other objects that retain, in their parts, reminiscences of utilitarian elements but which as they develop become more and more twisted as an original idea, resulting in an unsettling, yet undoubtedly attractive, object.
Arcaute contemporary art, known in Monterrey for its fresh proposals that are brought to the public without the mediation of any consideration of political correctness or of the preservation of conventional morals, presented this time around works by Thomas Glassford and Héctor Falcón. By the former we saw What is it about the volume of a drop / partitura azul, an aluminum piece that remained, because of its dimensions, in view for the public over the four days of MACO.
By Héctor Falcón, Arcaute brought photographs the author has collected from old archives, telling the story of the sexual lives and fantasies of women who, by their typology (the photographs are fro the 1970s and 1980s), were not professional prostitutes but worked in an incipient form of modeling, at times grotesque, at times naive.
From Berlin came the work of Susanne Weirich, represented by Múler Dechaira’s gallery. Her piece Silent Playground is the video reconstruction, with a real actress (Inga Busch,) of a story taken from the realm of video games, where movements, scenery, and the possibilities of an ending are shuffled into various alternatives. In those case, Weirich simulates the experience of a virtual game in which the player becomes responsible for the results of the action. Busch’s closes the circle of physical attitudes by imitating virtual characters that are, in turn, imitations of real ones.
With a great sense of black humor, Cristoph Draeger was present in the same gallery with his video The Last News, an intelligent parody of the US commercial TV newscasts, which emphasize disasters and tragedies as the most massively consumed, more profitable televised products. The name of the station Draeger chose for his piece was “MSNBC; 24-Hour disaster and survival news channel” 4 and through an anchor who relates situations of an increasingly more dramatic tenor, we learn that the most unbelievable disgraces are happening “live” throughout the world, which we witness as they jump to the news media.
As is usual in art fairs, MACO was the central event around which a number of visual arts-related activities took place, among them an individual show of works by Carlos Arias curated by Jaime Contreras, a compilation of the late Luis Miguel Suro at Enrique Guerrero gallery, and a splendid selection of photographs and light boxes by Alfredo de Stéfano that were shown at Praxis.
Alongside these events that in one way or another were directly connected to the fair, there were others with an entirely alternative character, such as the Encuentro de arte Contemporáneo Independiente de México, titled Chachamaco, which brought together creators such as Mónica Dower, Sarah Minter, Eugenia Benabib, and Alejandra Wah, among others. Here was also a group of students from La Esmeralda (Escuela Nacional de artes Plásticas) who “pirated” some of the most attractive pieces and sold their versions outside the fair at negligible prices.
MACO entered the path of consolidation as an art fair already with its 2004 edition, and this year it deserves noting the presence of a larger public and the greater interest shown by the press. Still young, this fair is perhaps destined to become the most important gathering of gallerists, curators, collectors, and creators in Latin America.
NOTES
1. “Atrae MACO a 18,000 personas,’ by Henry Mac Masters, La Jornada, p. 12a, April 21, 2005. Mexico.
2. Tercerunquinto (Author’s Note: derived from “tercero un quinto,” or 3rd 1/5.) This is the title of Jennifer Teets’ note in código 06140, December/January 04-05.
3. Jesús Abad Coronado, fragment of a text published in the triptych of his show Testimonio, presencias y vestigios at Quinta Galería, undated, reproducing 24 images dated between 1993 and 2002.
4. Although this video was presented to the public some months before the terrorist attacks of September 11 2001, among the tragedies included in Cristoph Draeger’s The Last News is a scene of destruction of one of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City.
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