ARCO Madrid 2024

As a reflection on last year’s presentation of three female artists, HOUSE OF CHAPPAZ & JOEY RAMONE now propose a joint presentation featuring recent work by three male artists in dialogue: Maurice Meewisse from Rotterdam, Antonio Fernández Alvira from Madrid, and Fito Conesa from Barcelona.

The interconnection of body, space, politics, and history becomes evident in the way the artists stage their work, piece by piece and as an installation. They primarily work within site-specific contexts, in which they understand the site as part of a complex network of interests, projections, and relationships. They immerse themselves in the (re)discovery of a space mainly through intuition, conceiving space as a container of disconnected and tacit stories hidden deep within the structure of objects. Within these, they seek discrepancy, a certain complexity, or a potential concealed beneath the surface.

In the case of Maurice Meewisse, the predominant material throughout the presentation is reclaimed wood because, in Maurice’s view, it is alive, transformative, and carries its own history. The presentation will include a selection of works from the immersive installation Isolators, which originally comprised 47 pieces of various sizes, made from different types of wood, from different timelines, with countless stories to tell, and sourced from across the Netherlands. Maurice Meewisse uses arboreal structure not only as a primary source for his sculptures but also as a means to express overlapping interpersonal, political, social, and historical narratives.

For Antonio Fernández Alvira, the starting point of Memory of Form is the reading or interpretation of the site for which this project was created: the Alhóndiga of Bilbao (originally built to store various food products, especially wine and oil) is understood as a container of containers. The resulting work is based on vessels traditionally used to hold and transport fluids, such as amphorae, jars, and large ceramic containers. Their forms and materials have been studied through processes of decomposition and fragmentation, working with these vessels in their fresh production alongside a potter—the last in a long lineage of potters from a small village in the province of Huesca.

Fito Conesa presents a video installation composed of three projections and a score, in which we see a musician playing the staves of the musical composition. The musician performs exactly the same score on each screen, but the temporal offset between them transforms the objective interpretation into a process of personal and non-transferable decision-making. To this, Fito adds another element: the weight of interpretation rests entirely on the expressive texts proposed by the artist to the musician—texts that go beyond TEMPO, DYNAMICS, ACCENTUATION, and CHARACTER, adding an unprecedented layer of objectivity.