SPECIAL REPORT: a dispatch from a contemporary art fair 🎨🖌️🖼️
A visit to Barcelona's Swab art fair, to share some findings on what's happening in the visual arts.
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Here’s some good news, maybe for the world but mostly for myself: this past weekend Barcelona hosted the seventeenth edition of Swab, a contemporary art fair with a global perspective that sweeps across Europe and Asia with a few entries from the Americas, UK, and Middle East. It was great! I had no expectations as I had attended last year and was a bit underwhelmed. This year I’m happy to share it was very enjoyable and that we are so back, meaning I am back on my art writing shit, reinvigorated and hopefully kicking off a series of posts about the visual arts (from my little corner of the world, which can be a lil limiting) (but I am hoping to be the change I need in my life, repeating a bit of history, a la Los Angeles, I’m Yours).
It was a cute lil gathering that brought together works by predominantly younger artists and playful (furniture) designs from galleries that are relatively new, all situated in a dog ear of the Fira Barcelona convention center. A surprising amount of people talked to me, telling me about artists and their galleries, completely unprompted, which was both welcome and warm considering that has maybe happened once or twice at the countless art fairs I’ve attended over the past decade. The vibe was more akin to ALAC than Felix, more like Matter and Shape than Frieze: it feels like a young fair, simultaneously unestablished but esteemed in its own way. Attendees swept demographics as there were many a children running around, darting in between younger couples and groups of elderly visitors. To my surprise, I even ran into someone I knew: Nicolas of , which had us digesting the fair (and the larger scene in the city) in real time for about thirty minutes. Let me tell you: all this put juice in the tank, enough to turn down the volume on last week’s subject, reminding again that I need to make my own local event and stop waiting for things to happen. Play an active role in your life’s change! (I just…need like seven hours more in my week and I’d be set.)
There were seventy exhibitors that included general gallery exhibitors, a dedicated wing for galleries from Tokyo and Seoul along with Taipei, there were a handful of design studios, and dedicated areas for very new, very young, and very non-traditional galleries. If you’ve been to an art fair before, Swab is no different. A key difference to me is that they had a sizable thumbprint for kids to make art, which they also had last year and is something I don’t remember seeing at any other fair before. Does that make it any better? Not really. Just a surprising something that jumped out.
For the sake of ease, we’ll explore thoughts on the show via the trends that I noticed, all that represent ongoing or potentially emerging trends in contemporary art. Note that this reflects the diverse galleries represented, which ideally has some microcosmic properties that go beyond the local to capture specific gestures and approaches that artists from Spain to Korea to the UK to Taiwan are considering. Let’s get into it!
First, the main themes and trends.
Memes are the new pop art.
This has been brewing for years and years and years and finally seems to have turned direct, years after artists like Eric Yahnker and Christine Tien Wang elevated the subject as pop culture skewer to stab through the world’s problems. This was most apparent in Elena Garrigolas’ showing at Ola, which saw children with adult male faces, mothers turning into furniture, and old people doing acrobatics, all of which seemed to pick up where Joan Cornellá left off but done in oil pastels. Raffaella De Chirico’s showing of Jacopo Mandich’s bound and concretized stuffed animals, offering a similar effect while evoking that of Highland Park icon Clare Graham and his bound and gagged stuffies. Nicolás Romero Escalada brought savage pop culture takes at Tramo, Daichi Sato had meme commentary at MJK, and Jinum Nam’s large scale anime inspired monsters at Space Willing N Dealing helped carry the same energy, proving that memes and the visual language of the internet has jumped from the screen to gallery walls — and that this is what pop art is in the 2020s. This isn’t new, as Instagram and Etsy has long been platforms for this style of art: the difference is that the traditional art world spaces are incorporating these gestures into the mix. This means memes are officially a language, a way of communicating, something that goes beyond in-joke instead invoking cultures and communities. That’s major! Stay tuned for Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami’s Talk Tuah statues. (By the way: speaking of Christine Tien Wang, she is still repped by Night Gallery but her latest show is with The Hole, which is a major sign of the times. Her new solo show is up through October 20!)
Welcome to the dawn of tiny art.
One of the biggest (Or smallest?) shocks was the amount ofgalleries showing teeny tiny itty bitty works, small sculptures to admire in the exhibition space of your palm. The most obvious representation of this was The Hague’s Tiny Art Gallery who turned their booth into an art fair unto itself as one hundred artists offered bite-sized works. This seemed like a one-off gimmick but this gallery was far from alone: Ham Jin at OOOOON had works displayed with magnifying glasses, asking viewers to take a closer look; Nienke Sikkema’s palm-sized glasswares at Post Modern Collection felt like Jolly Rancher vessels to hold your Jolly Ranchers; and both Greta Pllana at Naan and Nicolás Romero Escalada at Tramo presented hand-sized paintings (or smaller) that depicted everything from intimate moments to growling dogs. Jack Burton’s dioramas at Tube were photo, painting, and collage based but featured toy cars, key chains, stickers, and other ephemera placed around the image, as if the frame itself is a gallery, which all suggests the obvious: our space is limited — and anything can become a space for art. This is true, but it speaks to the obvious: no one has money to buy or sell giant art anymore. The story for the past year has been about how badly the art market is doing, that sales are slumping — crashing, even. What would happen if prices were lowered to works that were both more accessible, somewhat easier to produce, and allowed for more purchased by more people? Thus tiny art. No one can buy a house! Artists have a tough enough time making a living. The era of Kanye West wall-sized pieces isn’t over — but those willing to throw down cash are a smaller and smaller group, one who I’d argue are confined to LA and NYC. Tiny art is an anti-elitist practice that is for the people. It’s one of the more refreshing creative phenomena of this century! We’ll see if it continues and, like meme art, it suggests pluralism.
Textural feelings.
More artists than I could count were creating meditations on textures, paintings that imitated the texture of fabric to technologically driven patterns that verged on the tactile. Alexandre Zhu’s charcoal fabric drawings at Silica, Renault Calaj’s smearing, paint drying canvases at Contemporary Cluster, Vangar’s showing of Adrián Jorques, Claudia Pastomás, and Lara Ordóñez’s notably understated and spacial dwelling pieces, Alicia Gimeno’s crumbling linen at Abbozzo, Raúl Rebolledo metallic meditations at Escombro: these were studies of looks, recreations of textures in literal and metaphorical ways. The more interesting saw collisions with technology, like Laia Abril’s study of sound in black and white light boxes to reflect hearing losses at Set Espai D’Art. There was the feeling that more and more artists are stopping to admire the little things, to use very offline materials to push against these high-tech times. This was the major feeling that, despite the influence of memes, no one was trying to be “online” with their art. As only one exhibitor was devoted to high tech, inviting viewers to don VR headsets and sit on a poofy pink display, the vibe made clear that its more interesting to watch paint dry instead of live in a fantasy.
The ghost is the machine.
To the above: the mark of the machine was everywhere. Everyone is trying to escape tech and, yet, the printer and what is printed was clearly marking up everything, from the inclusion of shipping labels in pieces to feeling like certain works were attempting to evoke the visuals of a fax machine. Julio Varela at Galeria Fermay presented woodcuts that appeared like a copy machine went crazy, slicing into images instead of on them. Estanis Comella at Raccoon Projects had delicate pencil drawings of nature whose gray gradients also felt printed. Laia Abril did this too! Then there were the pixels and barcodes, as best exemplified by Ruben Mols’ dot-dash pixel work for CHAxART. Arthur Hoffmann at A-Topos evoked touchable metals, like the surface of a Macbook, as created via printed aluminum. No one wanted to directly approach the technological save for the VR display and the video art, the latter of which doesn’t count as that is the medium. The time of art being obsessed with technology isn’t over but this does perhaps articulate what we talk about again and again in this newsletter: no one wants to be online anymore. Like the memes, the influence and fingerprints of technology are ever-present — and so are the languages of tech. These shorthands will mark these times in art, whether intentionally or not, likely outliving much of the tech that is used and referenced, which is also to say: these are meditations on the things that we are sold as constants in our future but are proving to be quite ephemeral. Et tu, AI?
The great gentleness.
Are you picking up on how gentle things are? This was also reflected in materials and the choice of colors. These all suggest lighter hands and less “masculine” aesthetics in art.
There were a surprising amount of works created with mesh or translucent materials, all of which evoked light touches and light hands. Most impressive was Reeha Lim’s acrylic looks at city life on muslin stretched across frames for Chilli Art, which both inspired coziness and felt as if having a synesthetic meditation on trip hop songs. Casa Espacio featured what appeared to be a multi-artist collab, a group show that came to life in a tapestry that dominated the entirety of the booth. Sébastian Pauwels’ covered cardboard at Fermway suggested easy collapse while Leon Scott-Engel’s paintings on covered foam both offered light falls. Their lightness both in material, subject, and color made you feel like we all need to hug each other, to sit with each other and pet each other’s faces.
And if the materials weren’t enough, the colors not so subtly made it known that we want to be cute: both Finn Godwin and Donglai Meng at CHAxART gave direct and fantastical nature views; Koo Jiun at Ingahee had techno worlds in spiced pastels; Erin Armstrong’s undeniably catchy pastel pretty people at Alessandro Albanese were perhaps the most coveted, both to their being so trendy and so idyllic; all the Sancal furniture clearly got the memo years in advance. These works invited you to sit down for a story, to relax a little, to let colors soothe you.
The medium is the message here, that you can make works on air and paint with cloudscapes. Again: why do you need real life when you can escape to whatever your gentle imagination concocts?
These are a few other items I noticed, which seemed a bit smaller — but are still worth noting!
Undoing but upholding the archive.
This is to say: there were art history references, some better than others: Elena Garrigolas evoked Paula Rego, so said her gallerist to me which I could see but do think is a bit of a stretch; Hojan at SS Space Space was both directly and indirectly evoking Matisse’s paper cuts and the one dimensionality of Picasso, which is to say it’s as if those artists used painting to create near cartoons; Carlo Cittadini at Chilli Art took on the great Italian Renaissance painters, taking the era’s assumed queerness and turning it direct; and then there was Reload at Pantocrátor which I will let you see for yourself because I don’t have anything complimentary to say about them.
Sloganisms.
What also comes with the influence of technology and memes? Slogans, which kept popping up literally and sometimes even on the tees of persons depicted in works: Fabià Claramunt saw a few words pop up across the male chest at Fase, which Elena Garrigolas at Ola had a similar thing happening; Eric Stefanski at Escat had paintings that were specifically dedicated to words of wisdom, for better or worse; Jack Burton’s Tube dioramas featured as many added words as they did knick knacks.
HEAVY METAL.
This was something I noted at Matter and Shape back in March: metals are having a moment, not that I don’t think the moment ever stopped but it does seem to be particularly vocal a medium for objects now. We saw this via: both presentations by design booths Vasto and Pepe Valenti were near twinning thanks to silver works by Daisuke Yamamoto, Paul Coenen, and Pepe himself; Raúl Rebolledo’s works at Escombro were almost exclusively metallic inspired, with two works that were essentially giant zippable gold body bags; Mattia Guarnera at Tube painted many a modern picture — each of which had a person decked out in tons of metallic jewellery; Arthur Hoffmann at A-Topos had delectable is-it-metal-or-is-it-glass-or-neither works.
No landscape on earth.
Halfway through this experience I noticed that…there wasn’t much work about the environment, given that these are bad climate times. And then I saw them everywhere, presented as bizarre and otherworldly looks at this world: Andreas Steinbrecher’ at Shazar had the world reshaped to fit new spaces; the Perhutana display brought the earth inside, by literally unearthing it; both Finn Godwin and Donglai Meng at CHAxART offered delightful lil imagined nature romps; Juan Anton at ATM’s mega paintings of kinda-sorta trees broke the rules. Nature was everywhere and nowhere! Seems fitting.
DOGS!!!
Donglai Meng! Nicolás Romero Escalda! María María Acha‐Kutscher! Maybe ChiaoHan Chueh? Definitely the three separate dogs that I saw over the handful of hours that we were there. This is notable because I didn’t notice too many kids depicted in the works. But dogs? Yes. A Millennial sign of the times.
A special note about AI.
AI was notably absent, as far as what artists are willing to interact with and create works with and about. But I did have a strange sensation in the Sorondo booth, when looking at the work of the photographer Silvana Trevale: works like this and like this were newly confusing as they inspired questions of authorship and subject, that I may not be looking at a person, that the culture depicted may not even exist but instead be an imagined accumulation of references. I spent a lot of time with these works and kept returning to them, physically walking back to the booth to wonder if I was missing something. Could I trust these images? They were so perfect, framed in a way that suggested a prompting versus a meticulously set shot, painstakingly arranged people and place. They were striking, beautiful works! It was an unexpected questioning of creation, a moment of disgusting clarity that now we — as viewers, in any setting — have to question our reality. Is this or isn’t this real? What exactly am I looking at? Must I inspect the fingers and toes of every person in an image for the rest of my life, in case there are fused or contain extra fingers that I may miss? It was a situation like this, whether invited intentionally or not by the artist, that captured the frustrated and disgusting promise of AI: to make you question everything, to make you work harder and not smarter, to tax you with a constant double consciousness that ultimately clarifies and then rescinds your humanity. The future is here and it will likely ruin photography (but hopefully not the whole of art).
And there we have it! It was a good showing and I even got a few ideas for artists that I’d love to interview, both locals and non-locals alike. More on that in the new year, etc. as it’s definitely an ongoing project I’ll be taking on when I have more time as I make more baby steps back toward pitching stories, particularly about the arts. Stay tuned!
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