FIAC | Humanity, consumerism and the Future

Tianzhuo CHEN, Long March Space Gallery

Time: today I’m not going to speak about prices or the successes or failures of the market.
I’m mainly interested in looking at this show. I’m interested in individual works and their content as well as their relationship to society in both more intimate and general terms.
What is the human connection that is established between a visitor and an artwork in the context of an art fair where works and artists mix with the market across centuries and eras – all of which coexists within a few meters.
What does it mean, then, for a work to be placed in a fair and how much of an effect occurs when that work is in a stand that relates with other galleries with different goals from all over the world?
Fabio Mauri, Hauser & Wirth Gallery

I tried, therefore, to find an intimacy between myself as a physical subject and the entity of each individual work by extricating myself from the context, decoding what the work conveyed in this well-defined time – thus finding new ways of reading them.
I mentally made a series of time paths, looking for a dialogue between the past and present, working all the while with an idea of the contemporary and perceptions closer to the future that artists, who I felt closest to, presented.
I found incredible connections between formal elements and content between works by Fabio Mauri and Julia Wachtel, an interesting and successful relationship between strongly stated temporal elements between Giorgio Morandi, On Kawara and Richard Prince.
Julia Wachtel, Vilma Gold Gallery

Many galleries working with new and emerging artists presented work on the temporal compression that we are living today. Artists working with time through visual language / time in dialogue with each other such as Adriano Costa from Sadie Coles Gallery.
There were also many artists who analyze consumerism using the same, or close to the same, strategies that capitalism itself uses in their works. Using the same work as a form / brand that can represent these mechanisms now as an integral part of the art system – a good example being “Laetitia Baudat” and her brilliant and concise presentation.
Double vision and obsessive time can be observed In the work Schiavo di Terra (Nicola Samorì), 2015, presented by Gallery Monitor, where the work is meticulously made and sectioned with a destructive force full of energy and brightness almost as if to renounce the same beauty which makes itself up, creating yet another reading with which one can ponder the work.
Victor Man, Galleria ZERO

The work of Irma Blank was beautiful and smooth and was made using only a ballpoint pen. It was delicate and resembled a blue transparent satin fabric. Naturally I was not disappointed with Victor Man (gallery Zero) whose painting took me to a place that felt as though it were both past and present – a time that felt like it was suspended, all accomplished with one highly refined work.
The work of Ivan Seal was also beautiful, Raebervon Stenglin Gallery, where sculpture becomes painting and manages to convey the soul of sculpture from the end of the 19th century.

Many artists were really interesting, many of the works that should be in museums will be in private collections. There were many visitors, many art lovers, many people working in the system who all seem to have a single objective: to restore strength and intelligence to a system and to an audience where all too often the economy itself is master.

FIAC was an unexpected surprise – I witnessed a certain evolution of the art fair.

Lapo Simeoni

Adriano Costa, Sady Coles GalleryGiorgio Morandi, On Kawara, Giorgio Morandi, Richard Prince xxxxxxxxSimone Martini, Kaufmann Repetto GalleryDominique Gonzales-Foerster, 303 Gallery