Cartagena de Indias, founded around 1533 by Don Pedro de Heredia, and also known as La Heroica, was declared by UNESCO Historical and Cultural Heritage of Humanity. There, in the historic district or "corralito de piedras" as it is popularly called, with cobblestones, flowered balconies, streets filled with legends / facts evidenced in its museums, and architecture with castles, buildings from the colonial era, flanked by a long wall of nearly four years, appeared in January 2014 an original experience: the first edition of the ArtCartagena Fair.
The second edition of the event came true from January 9 through 15, in the beautiful Colombian coastal city overlooking the Caribbean. But it has grown, and flooded plus the Bovedas hotel spaces in Santa Clara a modern building built on ancient vaults dedicated to storing weapons, at Casa Pestagua hotel.
Both welcomed the International Art Boutique- Fair (sui generis) that is performed in the facilities of the hotel centers (suites that served to show the work brought for about twenty six galleries), transforming them into a unique experience in Colombia, either by the way they are exhibited and the platform that fosters relationships between galleries, collectors, visitors and specialists.
Arrivals from Mexico, USA, Peru, Venezuela, Argentina, Costa Rica, Brazil, Chile, El Salvador, Cuba, Spain, Switzerland and Colombia, the presence of these galleries formed by the artists represented, a powerful magnet that attracted by conceptual, striking, energetic and contemporary burden of their creations.
International Art Fair ArtCartagena 2015, is a project led by Walker Marketing Cultural, specialized service company, to create bonds between art, culture, business and market. Its work is supported in the career of its manager, Andrea Walker, who in her extensive work has developed high caliber spaces for the promotion and circulation of art. Among others, the creation and direction, for about eight years, the International Art Fair in Bogotá ArtBo, one of the largest in Latin America right now. Besides she putted Colombia on the artistic map with this initiative, starting in 2004, and the public and the Colombian art at a high level in the region and the world. Because from that moment, Colombians had the opportunity to attend a forum that illustrated them, as using a compass and thermometer, the temperature situation and art of their country, Latin American and international. Since then, the event has grown to unimaginable magnitudes, now under the leadership of the current director Maria Paz Gaviria. ArtBo is a reality that shines in Bogotá, and opens infinite perspectives to specialists, critics, collectors and, above all, to an interested audience to discover the artistic world without leaving home.
Why Cartagena? When answering the question, the charismatic director Andrea Walker expressed " she has confidence now in Cartagena de Indias, because it is a city that lives not only in the romantic memory of ancient struggles but also have an everyday wide cultural wealth, is capable of moving events like the International Film Festival, the International Festival of Music --- which coincided in the first edition on some dates with our Fair ---, which provided income for both events, and the Bienal de Cartagena ... among others ". She added that she dreamed, since she was in ArtBo, of founding a Fair with an innovative format, to mark the difference with other art events conducted in Colombia.
"I thought of a boutique style Fair with an intimate character." And she found the right place at these colonial and contemporary sites: the Bóvedas hotel of Santa Clara and the Casa Pestagua, "where each room, in addition to fulfilling their role of hosting, will be the exhibition space of the artists who will be present.”
The Latin American diversity
The comprehensive look of Latin American art was highlighted again, and in the foreground in ArtCartagena: its diversity, the one that makes it different and native, in a meeting that is aimed at focusing the creations of this part of the world. Thus, among more than one hundred artists represented, a huge percent corresponded to our continent.
Crossing the threshold of the door of each room-gallery-stand was like a dialogue with the magic of contemporary creation, as from the fifties to the present very good art in Latin America is produced. Top rankings examples of the most varied tendencies and movements stood again at the Fair.
Among other pleasant surprises, the name of the famous Serbian performance artist was highlighted: Mariana Abramovic --- ranked as one of the hundred most influential people in the world, according to Time magazine, thanks to her imaginative interpretations ---, who arrived lighting Bernal Espacio gallery (Spain) with stunning photographs of her performances.
D'Museo Gallery (Venezuela) approached relevant works of the masters Carlos Cruz Diez and Jesus Soto, architects on the continent and internationally of the op art stream and kinetic, and other names that follow their footsteps as Reymond Romero, who conducts research with textile elements through which he explores aspects of folklore and Latin American fashion. While Francisco Pereira in cast bronze sculptures collected by the nickname of Bipedos, builds a fabulous imaginary, from elements of an anthropomorphic zoology in which he intrudes concepts: the humanization of animals? While we think at the same time about us the men. The famous Colombian artist Nadin Ospina joined with his work Retrato de familia (acrylic on canvas and polyester resin, text on paper and light system) where he builds a treaty of breeds in a very original way. It is worth noting in this Venezuelan space the creations of Llajtu Kindi, an indigenous creator Inga community (Colombia). With an extraordinary ability to subvert meanings, the artist in his paintings (acrylic / oil on canvas) recreates the world of his ancestors in the series Líneas de la memoria. Over some abstractions to abduct the tones of nature (forest) given with texture and color, which would be the unconscious, he draws with minimal lines human figures, canoes ..., the universe of his ancestors - the conscious-. At the end he delivers a work that magnetizes the looks for the richness of speech and those forms that seem to come from the bowels of the earth. By the way, his sight will catch artistic treasures, very different from those filibusters came to seek in the past, because they expose and bring to the surface the inner richness of each creator.
Creations by Sair García (Klaus Steinmetz gallery, Costa Rica) are included in these roads, who on stainless steel plates summons the oil in the Magdalena series ---the river that gives its name --- to transform those polished surfaces into a unique space, whose boats float on the magic mirror.
At the stand of Logo Arte Consult (Brazil-Panama) you will stop in the work of Peruvian artist Gianna Pollarollo. On metal plates affects an exquisite drawing looking for the infinite sky above us, and stops in the theory of relativity and string to develop an interesting speech that will make you think / dream of those lines that reinvent the universe and its mysteries.
Unusual objects recreated the magic
The lithographs of Regina Silveira (Luciana Brito Gallery (Brazil) showed that creative talent makes you get closer, with contemporary energy, other graphic techniques where she adds concepts and skill at assembling these compositions that catch the attention, between pieces of known Cuban artists such as Roberto Diago, Sandra Ramos, Inti Hernández, Jorge López Pardo noted for excellent technical prowess and invoices. The boxes lights by Ernesto Javier Fernández in those extraordinary photographs that are coupled to unusual objects and recreate the view of a unique way to demonstrate not all is said in art. This could be corroborated in the space Co Gallery / Space Cuba (Chile / Cuba).
At the Forum gallery (Peru), the renowned creator Eduardo Tokeshi, Peruvian of Japanese origin, dazzled with the larger work that touches the installation, photography, painting, drawing ... and especially for the ability to combine in itself the spirit of their ancestors, the delicate forms that rescues the East and the colorful Andes, into a whole that strikes the viewer.
Among the masters’ creations of high caliber El Museo gallery gave in ArtCartagena, highlighted those real artistic gems of Alejandro Obregón, Carlos Jacanamijoy, Alvaro Barrios, Nadin Ospina ... where several trends and ways to make enriched the sample. A painting from 1953 shone with particular force, by the famous Colombian sculptor, one of the greatest of Our America: Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar, where also on the canvas and oil he immortalized those abducted forms of American heritage environment to build his prolific creativity.
The hall dedicated to the prominent Colombian artist Ana Mercedes Hoyos, recently deceased was a well deserved tribute to who in her life / work always highlighted in the first place the Colombian traditions, took art level aspects of daily life, people, manners ... and emphasized hues of the own environment and the idiosyncrasies of her country, which she deeply loved. The outstanding creator, who just over two years exhibited at the Jose Marti Memorial in Havana an interesting retrospective of her work, she gathered, as our miscegenation, in plural, varied modes of expression of American cultures: African, Pop Art and to the European post-impressionism. She was radical, because she drank and founded her project from the deepest roots of our peoples. In ArtCartagena lies her impression as specific interest of the organizers to pay tribute to the great artist.
Jacob Karpio gallery (Costa Rica) exhibited pieces of undeniable attraction. Among others the original works of the young Colombian artist Juan Camilo García, who in an almost quixotic task searches and "scrape" in the walls of the city, the remains of posters and signs --- then transformed into sculptures / walls, objects and original paintings, and photographs, as well as adding roles, adds life / history ---, to leave record of events and situations occurring over time in his native Bogotá, and thus build a unique map the time elapsed, among other objectives.
Cardinal names of Latin American art appeared in the list of, among others, the Argentine Julio Le Parc (with the Graphic Art gallery), the famous Colombian artist Eduardo Ramírez Villamizar and Edgar Negret, and the genius of abstraction of the continent, the Peruvian Fernando de Szyslo, along with young figures that colored this amalgam of our art.
The Alfredo Ginocchio gallery brought these excellent drawings, configured through a hyper-realistic technique that produces strangeness and wonder in the viewer of Hugo Lugo and the original Claudio Gallina (Argentina), who brings art to the notebooks used by students in schools, over which he draws, in an original and skilled way, countless human situations. And the US MAP emphasized themes such as migration, nature and absurdity under the motto "Nothing is impossible in Latin America and in art."
There was more. Because richness of arts in this region, with its moving presence in diverse fairs, biennials and global meetings, is a magnet that catches the eyes of the spectators. All this happened during those days in the innovative pavilions of exhibition in ArtCartagena 2015.
