Wall at Galeria Berenice Arvani booth including works by Leon Ferrari, Arnaldo Ferrari, and Hermelindo Fiamminghi

James and I attended the press preview and VIP reception tonight for PINTA, the modern / contemporary Latin American art fair.. Yes, they let press stay into the VIP period.

For someone like me who admires the modernism and geometric abstraction of Latin America in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a lot of great work from that period. I've put up an image above of a wall from the booth of Galeria Berenice Arvani, a São Paulo gallery. Unfortunately their website does not seem to be loading tonight.

On the contemporary front, a new discovery tonight was the work of Matías Duville. Here is a detail of the giant acrylic on particle board work in the booth of Galeria Alberto Sendros. It's related to this piece on the artist's website.

Matías Duville (detail)

The artist creates works on unusual media and then distresses them in some way. The booth across the aisle from Galeria Alberto Sendros was a Madrid gallery named Distrito Cu4tro which had some works with ink on silk, where the artist had pulled the threads of the silk after drawing on the surface to distort his images.

Distrito Cu4tro also had some great work by Venezuelan artist Alexander Apóstol who now lives and works in Madrid. In addition to large digital photographs of tall buildings in Venezuela with windows removed and graffiti added, there was a digital collage of personal ads from young Latin men (gay or otherwise) seeking American or European male "clients" to bring them to those richer continents. There was also a video titled "AV. libertador" of transvestites talking to the camera claiming to be important Venezuelan artists such as Gego or Armando Reverón.

Alexander Apóstol
AV. libertador, 2006
DVD, sound (Still)

Finally, Poligrafa from Barcelona had a beautiful set of untitled etchings by Argentine artist Fabian Marcaccio based on an attempted coup in (I think) the 1990s. Here is one small image from the gallery's website.

Fabián Marcaccio
Sin título 2, 2007
Etching
71.0 × 86.0cm