Repeating Islands

EFE reports that the 8th edition of the arteamericas fair in Miami opened Friday showing the best in Latin American art, at a time when its creativity is having a weightier influence on the market and collectors’ interest in where it is taking the plastic arts is growing.
The world’s most important Latin art fair, which winds up a  week from tomorrow, represents in its 8th edition more that 300 Hispanic creative talents, both renowned masters and up-and-coming artists, with works from some 50 galleries in Latin America, Europe, the Caribbean and the United States. “The art market is trending upwards, even though it has been hit hard by the economic crisis, and it is in Latin American art where there is the most interest in discovering new talent,” fair director Dora Valdés-Fauli told Efe.
In her opinion, the excellent sales of Latin art racked up at New York’s Armory Show, and in the last edition of the Art Basel fair in Miami, are evidence of “a really big improvement” in the market. That’s why, the fair’s new director said, “this is the perfect time to buy Latin American art,” among whose top figures is Colombian painter Pedro Ruiz, one of the undoubted stars of the four-day fair. This is a Latin master, Valdes-Fauli said, who drifts between myth and reality, with “highly interesting” works on show at the exhibition that “express the problems of Colombians displaced by the violence.”
As for the fair’s new selection committee, she said that “seriousness and independence” have been their premise for taking on the task of “raising the standard of quality in participating galleries” located in cities from Berlin, Bogota, Buenos Aires and Caracas to Chicago, Miami, Madrid and Santiago. This edition offers, among other novelties, a special support project for the community of Haitian artists affected by the recent earthquake, under the title of the Haitian Art Relief Fund, directed by the famous painter from that Caribbean nation, Edouard Duval-Carrié. Duval-Carrié has invited artists from around the world to donate some of their works to this enterprise, which will then send the funds collected to ease the living conditions of Haitian artists. In that context, arteamericas is presenting Contemporary Haitian Memory in Motion, an opportunity to see works by artists whose studios were destroyed by the quake.
The fair’s ambitious program this year includes a special exhibition in preparation for celebrating in 2013 the 500th anniversary of the discovery of Florida by Spaniard Juan Ponce de Leon, and in the year 2015 the 450th anniversary of the founding of St. Augustine, the first permanent city in the United States. Besides the Madrid gallery Arte Globas, this section is presenting a group of Catalan artists including Pepa Roch, with the work “Pensamiento,” a representation of time passing reflected in the prow of a ship, and Josep Puigmarti, who offers a symbolic set based on ancestral Central American cultures.
The subtle installation art of another Catalan, Miguel Pujol, recreates an old fishing net to suggest the primordial role of music in Latin culture. Finally, the sculpture of Salvador Dali, “Man on a Dolphin,” with its Mediterranean echoes, is imbued with a message of diversity and plurality. Emilio Calleja, vice president of the fair, said that in the exhibition works by brilliant young artists mingle with pieces by renowned figures like Argentina’s Leon Ferrari, one of the most important Latin plastic artists in the world, and the late Cuban avant-garde painter Wifredo Lam (1902-1982). EFE

http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=354415&CategoryId=13003

Image: Edouard Duval Carrié’s Hero Planant