Zona Maco art fair: cultural art fair marks its 7th year

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
April 21, 2010

With nearly a hundred galleries sharing an endless 10,000-square-foot expanse, the single stories of artists and collectors suddenly blended into a collective hum as Mexico’s contemporary art community clamored together under one roof.

Amidst the buzz, however, emerged a classic rookie tale.

Less than a year after opening its doors in Mexico City’s Bosques de las Lomas neighborhood, the Caja Blanca gallery has headed straight to the big leagues. At last weekend’s Zona Maco international art fair (whose letters stand for México Arte Contemporáneo), the fine arts showroom found its stand outside of the “new proposal” zone and among Mexico’s most established galleries.

While the difference might mean little more than location to some passersby, the distinction signals a higher level of prestige and experience to other gallerists and collectors, explained Patricia Bessundo, who opened Caja Blanca in mid-2009 with Alejandra Funtanet and Lorena Jauregui.

“It was a top priority for us to be accepted here in our first year,” she said at the expo center. “Today, the Zona Maco is considered the best contemporary art fair in all of Latin America. Having the opportunity to be here has already opened doors. We’ve had a huge flow of people from the media, young artists, collectors, and other foreign gallerists who are interested in arranging artistic exchanges.”

The five-day art expo, now in its seventh edition, was held in the capital city’s Centro Banamex convention center. More than 25,000 visitors stopped by to check out works by 900 artists who hailed from 20 different countries. (The April 18 inauguration drew in 9,000 guests alone). Drink sponsors at the event pushed around carts of cocktails as an each day’s undying crowd maneuvered through the maze of gallery stands, a set-up worth 20 million pesos in participation costs.

Zona Maco director Zelika Garcia described the event as “a cultural platform between artists, collectors, gallerists and curators, plus the general public.

“Not only do we have an exhibition and art sale happen…the fair also creates a cultural environment in Mexico that we can grow upon each year,” she told The News. “We’re creating a new culture of art collection in the country.”

Contemporary artists representing the Caja Blanca gallery at the fair included Renato Grazo Cervera, whose puzzle-like, skeleton wood sculptures hung playfully overhead. His piece “El Dios,” for instance, recreates Renaissance artist Michelangelo’s fresco that depicts God’s hand reaching toward Adam.

“I like to play with ordinary images and give them a twist to portray them in another way,” he said at the stand. He added that the fair “gives artists important exposure to a public who otherwise might not go to museums or exhibits.”

Artist Manuel Mathar said that he was most looking forward to swinging by Zona Maco’s ever-growing international selection. Mather exhibited his set of small-scale, objectivist oil paintings titled “Cosas que copian cosas” (“Things that copy things”) at the Caja Blanca set-up.

“I have the possibility here to see things that I could only see otherwise by traveling to the
countries from where the galleries hail,” he said.

Noted Mexican galleries in the art fair’s principal zone included Kurimanzutto, Ginocchio Galería, I-20, OMR, Travesía Cuatro and Galería Enrique Guerrero. Among the “new proposal” galleries were Yautepec Gallery, Toca Galería, Antena Estudio and TalCual. Cultural publications such as Vice and Fahrenheit also set up booths near the expo center’s entrance.

The art fair’s two-year-old Zona Maco Sur selection featured 20 emerging artists from the southern hemisphere, with little previous exposure in the Mexican scene.

Tropical Brazilian music thumped from the speakers of Carlos Contente’s stand in the section. The young illustrator from the Rio de Janeiro gallery A Gentil Carioca showed a massive wall display with painted vinyl records that replace old-school images with urban graffiti.

Contente called his space a “theatrical zone between the public and the artist” that encourages dialogue and puts Contente in contact with other cultures, or, as he put it, inspires a “globalization of the heart.”

Yonamine, an artist billed from both Luanda, Angola, and Lisbon, plastered the three walls of his booth with a stunning installation. Broad sheets of newspapers hid their black-and-white text behind silkscreen shapes and images in bold shades of red, green and gray.

Up-and-coming Mexican artists received a special nod of their own. Tequila maker José Cuervo’s charitable wing awarded its Centenario prize to Maximo González, who came to Zona Maco on behalf of the Valle Ortí Gallery from Valencia, Spain.

Local media reported that the gallery paid $10,000 to purchase González’s artistic intervention, which uses plastic objects to reflect on petroleum’s widespread use and the world’s endless consumption of the fossil fuel. Plastic water bottles, cups and buckets were scattered throughout the booth and connected by a red light mimicking the beams of a high-tech alarm system.

Encilia Gómez Maqueo, a spokeswoman for Fundación Cuervo, said after the Friday award ceremony that the Zona Maco had helped to transform contemporary art in Mexico in the past seven years.

“This is a fair with very strong educational and cultural impacts. It gives society the opportunity to visit a great amount of works in a limited time and space that would be impossible to see any other way,” she said.

Zona Maco in Monterrey is set to take place this year from Sept. 2 to 5 at the Hotel Hábita.

For more details, visit www.macomexico.com.