Neomania #45. Art Fairs hopping in Madrid
Every artist is a storyteller. Each creator has a message, a speech, a story to tell. Instead of pages, he speaks in paintings. His sentences are shapes. His words are colours. Each chapter is an exhibition. And the fairs are banquets or rather visual bacchanalia.
Today, in the middle of the tsunami of art fairs in Madrid, I go out with a novel drunkenness. And it’s not exactly the Stendhal Syndrome… (a psychosomatic disease that can arise while visiting museums or arty cities like Florence). Every day it is more difficult for me to find sublime art, something that touches my soul.
What is clear to me is that we are of a race, without any doubt, very creative. Spain is a country of artists. That explains the excess of this week. Arco has given birth to so many children!
After the mother of all fairs, Arco, other Art fairs have been born like mushrooms in the forest: Art Madrid, Flecha, Hybrid, Just-Mad, SAM (Salón de Arte Moderno), Standarte, Urvanity or UVNT…
They all give exposure to thousands of artists (although many are left out). They all coincide in time, which means that the poor art lover has to choose and needs to be hyper-selective when deciding where he goes, like a chicken without a head.
A surreal excess like Dali’s excesses, absurd like Picasso’s cubes, childish like Miró’s scribbles… but it’s a real joy.
Long live Madrid and LONG LIVE ART!
A fair allows you something impossible in a museum. With a little skill, you can meet a painter, sculptor or photographer, as well as admire (or hate) their work.
An artist is a whole world of feelings, memories, sensations, dreams, nightmares, love and hate stories. That’s why I like so much speaking with them and trying to peak into their minds.
To see the works while talking with a painter is to enter his personal world, it’s trying to understand a little more what he does, why and how… although really, the best thing about artists is that they don’t even understand themselves. They never know where they are going with their brushes.
Their “leitmotiv” is a blank canvas.
I love getting to know them because artists are basically a cocktail Molotov, an explosive mixture, hybrid beings like the centaurs from Greek mythology or the mermaids in Homer’s Odyssey…
Because an artist is a symbiosis of two faces, with opposite and contradictory parties. An artist is half child and half crazy. Long live the artists!
Before we lost thousands of hours watching TV. Now we are slaves, also hypnotised by other little screens that wash our brains… I propose freedom from machines.
Every human being should write, draw, paint, sing, play music, sculpt, dance, act, waste time admiring clouds or stars and never, never stop daydreaming.
Then this planet would become a better world.
+ CHRISTIAN LOUBOUTIN + OZANGÉ + MANDARIN PRAGA + ON AURA TOUT VU + CUBISM + GAURAV GUPTA + EILEEN GRAY + THEO JANSEN + STEPHANE ROLLAND + LA RESIDENCIA + HISTORY OF THE FOTOGRAPHY + RAHUL MISHRA + OCT DESIGN MUSEUM + BRUNO MUNARI + HOTEL DE CRILLON + ZUHAIR MURAD +
