Mexico City – Visual Arts’ New Berlin
Words/Photos: Virginie Puertolas-Syn
When I landed in Mexico City to attend the Artweek earlier in February, I was not sure what to expect. Apparently, for the past few years, the metropolis has been gaining serious momentum amongst Art lovers and collectors for both its cultural heritage and local art scene. Some even called it the new “Berlin”.
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The VIP opening of Zona Maco’s 16th edition at the Centro Citibanamex convention centre was well attended. It is by far Latin America’s largest and most distinguished fair. Yet, the number of galleries, over 70 of them, is small enough to keep a “salon” feel to it, as opposed to the gigantic fairs of Europe and Miami. It makes the whole fair experience very pleasant, and fairgoers obviously enjoyed it. Collectors were from the region, including North America, with some international collectors eager to discover the Mexican art scene.
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Steve Turner’s gallery from LA presented the works of Pablo Rasgado. I visited Pablo’s studio the day before the fair and was wholly taken by his abstract monochrome works. Pablo’s work is utterly subtle and bears the trace of architecture, a subject that he is passionate about. Like a contemporary archaeologist, he “extracts physical segments of facades, preserving and presenting a range of indexical traces”. One of his works is the extraction of the print of the face and hand of a young man arrested by the police he witnessed one night in LA.
