The 12th Este Arte Opens With Mighty Showing of Sculpture and Painting

Silver appears to be leaking from the white gallery walls at last week’s 12th Uruguayan Art Fair in the resort town of José Ignacio. But no need to clean it up, because it’s a metal installation by Brazilian artist Vanderlei Lopes.

In his first sculptural practice, López molded aluminum into petrified torrents that poured out of a hole in the wall of Almeida and Dell’s booth and pooled on the fair’s concrete floor. The small sculptures – painted to resemble Coca-Cola cans, Styrofoam cups and crumpled paper – appear to float in the molten stream.

At first, second, and even third glance it looks like a newspaper with a satellite image of a terrible hurricane, when in fact it is a single piece of presentation, in fact a silver piece with typefaces carefully painted on both sides. The surfaces of the pieces are polished to a mirror-like sheen, attracting visitors’ reflections and, judging by the blistering sales, their wallets.

Taken together, López’s nine new works speak to the environmental and sociopolitical tensions that run through South America’s past and present, specifically the coastline where the Este Art Center is located. This is where consumerism, ecological waste, and struggles over mineral resource extraction all converge, downstream from the United States—now exacerbated by the United States’ ongoing destabilization of Venezuela in an oil-driven geopolitical situation.

The event attracted 5,000 visitors over the course of four days, and there was a productive friction between the fair’s idyllic setting, the gentle camaraderie that sustains a miniature art ecosystem, and the works on display, much of which favored technical precision and conceptual irony. At Aninat Galeria, which has spaces in Chile and London, Chilean artist Germán Tagle presents a series of new liquid landscapes rendered through stencils, in which rivers, foliage and wetlands collapse into a single, mutated organism. Rather than being didactic, the paintings evoke the history of environmental intervention in the area, recalling projects that sought to regulate nature through bioengineering.

Accompanying these works are modified reproductions new york times Front page: Adoption of the League of Nations, Ireland’s secession from the British Empire, former Mexican President Victoriano Huerta’s refusal to salute the American flag, and more. Tugger added a few wavering strokes to each newspaper that scrambled the historical record, causing disparate reports to bleed together.

A similar sense of distortion is present at Galerie Jocelyn Wolff in Paris, where Diego Bianchi’s “New Cement Bodies” are on display, a series of indoor and outdoor sculptures that feature chiseled figures sprouting metal tubes that bend beyond physical comprehension. Taken together, these works reveal a shared fascination with political, ecological, and physical interventions in which efforts to impose a new natural order instead alter outside expectations.

Most of the 14 exhibitors participating in this exhibition brought abstract works. Fair founder Laura Bardier said ESTE Arte has long favored this approach, a trend that fits perfectly with the region’s art-historical lineage, highlighted by this year’s Lucio Fontana exhibition at the nearby Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry. It turns out to be a safe bet. The gallery said most of the works on offer have been sold.

Two powerful examples include Emil Lukas’s work at the Piero Atchugarry Gallery, characterized by concentric, spider-like weaves that reveal more transparent layers the closer they are, and Francisca Maya’s project Circle Dance at the Black Gallery, a study of the Bauhaus style in its most basic form. Maya, who is trained in design, repeats the sickening circles on fabric and clear acrylic panels, the latter stacked in light boxes that emit a soft glow. The effect is one of perpetual, low-level movement: Booth is like a field that permeates cells, molecular rather than vast, psychedelic but evading associations with cancer.

In contrast to this abstract focus, Valerie’s Factory, established in Buenos Aires in 2021 and one of the youngest participating galleries, presented a talk titled “Technorganic Bodies”. This booth is a solo exhibition by Argentinian artist Trinidad Metz Brea and is sure to be an eye-catcher at any fair around the world. On the marble and wood sculptures and giant graphite paintings sold during the fair, bats, insects and other “undesirable” creatures described in the gallery took violent revenge on humans. Embrace the grotesque or perishsuggesting a painting of a writhing, multi-breasted woman. The fair’s affluent audience also embraced this: Fundación Amado, Guatemala’s main regional tastemaker, purchased a piece by Metz Brea. Hopefully future fairs will also remember the value of this rough beauty in paradise.