ARMA GALLERY proudly announces the grand opening of its new space located at Valverde 30, Madrid. The inauguration took place on December 13, 2023, featuring a captivating inaugural exhibition curated by the esteemed Oscar Manrique.
Inaugural Exhibition: A Fusion of Generations and Disciplines
Curated by Oscar Manrique, the exhibition showcases a diverse group of talented artists, including Elena Gual, Natalia Romanciuc, Papartus, Jorge Nava, Juan Sotomayor, Carlos Cartaxo, Misterpiro, and Seleka. The collection presents a rich tapestry of artistic expressions, celebrating the evolution of contemporary painting.
Visiting the Exhibition
The exhibition is now open for viewing, extending an invitation to art enthusiasts, collectors, and the curious to immerse themselves in the captivating artworks. To schedule a visit, please contact ARMA GALLERY via email at info@armagallery.com or visit our new space from Monday to Friday, 11 am to 6 pm.
Reflecting on Contemporary Painting
Oscar Manrique’s curated exhibition reflects the gallery’s commitment to defending and promoting the essence of painting. The showcased works explore diverse themes, from abstraction to new figurations, architectural explorations to the interplay of digital and analog elements.
About the Exhibition: A Reflection by Oscar Manrique
Celebrating every beginning, every time someone from my generation, that of the “lost,” stands up, says, enough to all those absurd laws that clip our wings; I go, I grow, here we are, art continues, and we hand in hand. I celebrate that this first space has been born from the affection of a young gallerist for her painters, the conjunction in this place of several generations, but above all, the unconditional defense of the discipline, for there is no more elegant and beautiful way to inaugurate a space than by recalling the essence of those ancient Parisian salons. This is a necessary encounter, like those of yesteryear, where the idea of painting as an end, as a way of thinking, was forged and defended, in many cases, about painting itself. And that is why this exhibition has a certain air of nostalgia, the echo of those who forced us to reflect and continuously rethink the place of the discipline, as well as why and how to keep painting. The key to contemporary painting, interested in evidencing itself as painting.
To defend painting, one has to know it intimately, in all its versions and drifts, observe it in all its forms of matter, in its most expansive ways, see it in the staunch defenders of abstraction, but also in the new figurations that arrive with great expressive power in this decade. We finally speak of artists who are concerned with analyzing space, paying attention to its architectural and symbolic conditions, to the time and specific situation that defines the place, to its reading. But also of gesture and matter as protagonists of the canvas. As art historian Yves Alan Bois said, the importance of painting is not its essence but its problem, the historical problems linked to it. Today, all these achievements are seen in a natural way, since for years it has been a trend for many artists not only to express themselves on the canvas but to surpass it. To transgress its rigidity, to draw new possibilities to conquer the void, to review the paths erected by the masters, and even to strangle them and play with their remains. Today’s painting is predominantly mestizo and, in that sense, neo-baroque, as it is increasingly tending towards hybridization, collage, graffiti, the solution of disciplines, and the combination of the digital and the analog. The 21st century has fixed it in a philosophy of disorder and instability, in an aesthetics of chaos.
This is current painting, which no longer has to worry about its essence in a reductionist or expansionist sense but simply has to signify itself as a starting point to reach other debates, to other encounters where external social notions are not projected onto the works but related to their own construction strategies and, of course, with their own linguistic strategies. That is why it is not necessary to abuse theory for its study; each of the works presented here speaks for itself, and after all, our task as gallerists, curators, or managers is to defend the object, not what surrounds it. But we can promote these dialogues that resist formal analysis and maintain a unique relationship with the viewer. A new dialogue that provokes different readings of the works, in other times and in other companies.
The curious thing is that all these artists somehow manage to revolutionize painting without disrupting its structural foundations. In all these cases, we recognize the scene (contemporary), the garments belong to our present, and we assume the time in which they are happening as ours, but the gesture refers us to models from the history of art to the point of recognizing the image as pictorial. And it is that, after so much audiovisual inflation, it is the turn of painting again for the fact of claiming the tactile as a means of communication. In other words, in this new era, painting has privileged its own surface as a transmitter between the mind, feelings, and ideas because, in the end, as critic Donald Kuspit said, painting is nothing more than the construction of an ethics and, ultimately, a metaphysics. As I have always maintained, each canvas is a law of the universe, and today we are fortunate to contemplate several worlds in one place.
Oscar Manrique
A special thanks to @garagewineofficial, @torredesantiago23, and @cervesamontseny for their generous support. Also, a heartfelt acknowledgment to @exhibitionphoto and @mrberro for the photos, and to everyone who made this possible.
