MACO: Mexico City Art Fair
By Margaret Failoni June 16, 2006
 

The 2006 Mexico City Art Fair was quite an experience. The last art fair I attended was several years ago in Guadalajara. It was small but decent. After a few years' run, they closed down.

I guess it didn't drum up enough business or public. This is the third year the fair takes place in Mexico City, and it was truly disappointing. I have participated in many art fairs and visited most, the local Italian ones-Rome, Bologna, Turin and Bari-and most of the international ones: Basle, FIAC in Paris, ARCO in Madrid, The New York Armory show and the Chicago International. 

Never have I come across such a mess. There were a handful of galleries that were decent … not great, but decent. The rest was pitiful. The stands were sloppy, badly presented and looked very unprofessional. Most of the art shown looked like amateur night. There was great deal of pseudo-conceptual art-but without a concept-plus badly drawn pictures on paper clipped to the walls, multicolored plasteline, wiggly things hanging from strings, badly photographed videos, and handheld digital camera footage amateurishly shot, totally without content.

Many European galleries were in the "new art" section located on the top floor. Hard to believe they would come so far to show such bad and badly presented … something, which I refuse to call art. The escalators didn't go up that far, and when the two working elevators finally came it was impossible to get into them.

So, one wearily climbed two flights, hoping it would be worthwhile, but of course, it never was. Furthermore, the fair was not held in the large, modern fair building in the Colonia Del Valle, but instead it took place in a smaller building off the Reforma with no air conditioning. Words cannot describe the heat. There was no ventilation and there were incredible crowds. I was pleased and flattered to receive an invitation to the opening night. Little did I realize that everyone else in Mexico had received an invitation. All the fairs I have been to in the past have had a special, by-invitation-only opening night for the galleries working the fair and including two tickets for their guests. Everyone else pays for very expensive tickets, and the monies go toward a benefit: for a new museum, special artists' scholarships, and so on. There is a beautiful buffet, wines are served, and usually there are many well-dressed and well-behaved people seeing and hoping to be seen. The Mexico City opening was … well, I guess you could say it was more democratic. The impression was that all 20 million people in the city were there that night. 

It was almost a stampede! Every artist or pseudo-artist was present, students of every age, dealers, their parents and children, the press, but I didn't get the impression there were collectors that night.

The following day, most of the stands were staffed by gallery personnel. The principal dealers were back in their galleries, I presume, receiving clients. I guess that's where most of the horse trading was taking place. I did see many Americans with "dealer" written on their faces being met and taken by cab to the various galleries and special venues set up for that art week.

I ran into a few San Miguel artists and collectors, all with wan expressions on their faces.

One collector, when asked what he thought of the fair, answered after a pause: "Let's just say there's nothing here I can't live without!"

In all fairness, there were a few galleries that put their best foot forward and therefore are worth mentioning. The major Mexican galleries that were also the official ambassadors for the fair all did a good job of preparing and presenting their stands. Entering the ground-floor exhibition area, one came across the Galleria de Arte Mexicano's stand. They presented a frontal wall painted Chinese red as a backdrop for Jan Hendrix's beautiful, small bronzes. They showed some classic Mexican art, such as a small Siqueiros oil, as well as a selection of their contemporary artists, including a small, beautiful oil by San Miguel artist Mari José Marin. 

The OMR Gallery was located on the second floor and had a very clean and linear exhibition of works by José Leon Cerillo, black and white optical art reminiscent of the 1970s.

Oscar Roman had a large stand showing far too much work all hung helter-skelter, but most of good quality: works by Agostin Castro Lopez, Mariana Pereyra, Gabriel Guerrero and Ricardo Villasana, all painters.

In short, out of over 70 galleries exhibiting from Mexico, The United States, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, England, Colombia, Canada, Puerto Rico, Argentina and Brazil, very few were worth the effort of going to see them. The best, in my book, were the aforementioned Mexican galleries, plus Galeria Luis Adelantado from Valencia, Spain and Miami, Florida, showing very good photo art; Galeria La Caja Negra from Madrid with an exceptional stand, showing works by Bethsabeé Romero, Jan Hendrix, Richard Serra and Ben Vautier; Drexel Galeria from Garza Garcia, Nuevo Léon, Monterrey, showing interesting paintings by Armando Romero and the wonderful Daniel Lezama; George Kargl Fine Arts from Vienna with very good photo art and beautifully executed collages; KBK Arte Contemporaneo from Mexico City with interesting, small sculptures and wonderful C-print art photography; the Mackey Gallery from Houston, Texas, with good paintings by Francisco Larios and some very interesting, well-executed sculpture by Martin and Sicilia and Carole Benzaken; 

Galeria El Museo from Bogota, Colombia, has some very good painters and sculptors, including Botero and Aurora Cañero; the Galeria Myto of Mexico City had very fine paintings and sculpture by Angel Ricardo Rios and Ariel Orozco;

Galeria Praxis had its usual stable of fine figurative and neomannerist painters such as Roberto Cortázar, Hugo Lugo and wonderful photo pieces by Sandra Valenzuela; Galeria Quetzalli from Oaxaca showed unusual and interesting small paintings by Sergio Gaval, small ceramic sculpture by Laura Roseto and an interesting video by Irene Dubrovsky; and last, the Quinta Galeria also from Bogota, Colombia, with fine paintings by Pedro Txillida and Nicolás Uribe.

I was assured on the following day that sales went well that opening night and when counting the red dots, paintings were what sold and some photography. 

Will I go back next year? You bet. It can only get better. For those dealers wanting to participate, next December is the time to request application forms for 2007 from MACO Mexico City Art Fair. It is most definitely not an avant garde art venue like Basle, but painting is still the prima donna, and if you present quality, it will sell.

Margaret Failoni is an art critic and curator and Generator gallery in San Miguel.



Breaking the barrier of the self
By Melanie Harris 

It is common to hear people say that they have moved to San Miguel with the intention of "finding themselves." This is not a new concept, however, and some people move to New York to find themselves-or to Italy, or to Walden Pond, or back home with the parents, for that matter. What strikes me about this comment is the word "self" and its conjunctive forms. It is a term that has eluded my deciphering since my early twenties when in college I read Borges's Labyrinth.

The semantics are overwhelming in this one. It is the reason that the title of Roland Salazar Rose's new body of work, "Breaking the Barrier of the Self," sparked my interest and spurred my analysis to such a teeth-grinding fixation that it was impossible to pull myself away from his studio. Did he mean it as a noun, pronoun or adjective? I was not going to ask-I was bent on figuring it out for myself.

Roland Salazar must have struggled with his Self and its definition, as most artists do, for most of his life. He has lived and studied in the US, France and Mexico, each country with innately different cultural expectations and definitions of the Self. From every conversation with the artist, I can tell he is a deep and spiritual person who very much loves creating his art, yet there is a struggle within him (for there must be one in every passionate person, artist or not). Does he listen to his American side or his Mexican side, or does he scrap it all and redefine his Self? How does one incorporate it and still "break its boundaries"? This is not meant to be a philosophical article. I am no Schopenhauer, nor am I willing to go into such depth on a topic on which whole philosophies are based. I am admiring that this artist was moved to ponder such a topic, for what are artists if not visual philosophers? I do not claim to know Mr. Salazar well enough to delve into his subconscious, or even into his conscious, for that matter. I can only interpret his art in the manner I interpret everyone else's, based on my own personal experiences. It moves me-all of it. Before me is a Mexican-inspired art brut. 

The landscapes and the portraits with their bright colors and intensity and fluidity of strokes and the translucent quality of his medium are speaking to me.

Yet, I still cannot stop asking myself what the title has to do with anything. 

All of a sudden, in a moment when I leave my head behind, it all starts to makes sense. On a re-read of the title, a sense of freedom comes over me, a feeling that reminded me why abstract art can be so attractive-the Freedom. The color and light and intensity of San Miguel has taken the Self and has set it free. Will it be a permanent freedom? A futile question without an answer in the present; it distracts from the moment. For the moment it feels good, it looks great and it sets me free.



Visual Echoes

The infinite reflection of the glance allows us to recognize ourselves and to recognize in ourselves the diverse facets of our states. 
-Flor Acosta 

Analí Núñez, Zaida Sánchez, Verónica Santoyo, Mariana Téllez and Gonzalo García, students of diverse specialties in the visual arts degree program, express their talents in a variety of media-painting, photography and sculpture-to show us the best of their efforts.

Charles Baudelaire said: "Make the invisible visible." The works in this exhibit give form to this idea: They are like a bridge stretching between what is formally enunciated and what has been proposed. None of the artists in this group could really be considered a conceptualist, yet all of them have the freshness that so many conceptual artists lack.

The exhibit continues thru June, Instituto Allende, Ancha de San Antonio 22.