EMERGING ART II
Award goes to Walls 2, by Navarran artist Carlos Irijalba.
Navarran artist Carlos Irijalba, represented by the Moisés Pérez de Albéniz gallery, won the 2018 ART Situacions ARCOmadrid Prize, awarded on the evening of 23 February and worth 15,000 euros.
This private award, which fosters artistic creation combining art and culture, aims to confirm ART Situacions commitment to emerging international art by encouraging young creators and thus publicising contemporary art.
The winning work was selected from those on exhibition at the art fair by a committee of professionals made up of Lorena Martínez de Corral, art historian and independent curator, and Ilaria Gianni, curator and writer. The winning work will be added to the ART Situacions collection.
The prize was awarded in Room 37, Hall 9 of the exhibition site, with the participation of the selection committee, Mr Carlos Urroz, Director of ARCOmadrid, Mrs Pilar Forcada, Director of ARTSituacions, and Mr Marcel Pascual, Director of Honda – Greens Power Products.
About the winning work:
Walls 2, 2017
150 x 230 cm
Print with pigmented inks on framed Hahnemühle paper.
Ed. 1/5 + AP
Walls is a wall that runs through the Tolima jungle by road. The work is a reaction to the way in which humans open up routes for road traffic and the jungle reaches out and owns them within hours. Its advance is visible virtually overnight, and a government service constantly cuts and repairs this permanent open wound.
The severity of this reordering of the landscape in the context of Colombia is an issue of geopolitical importance: the way in which other communication infrastructures, such as rail—which until the mid-20th century was the main form of modern transport—have been disfavoured until they disappeared due to the imposition of oil dependency in society. Goods traffic by road constantly causes fatal accidents and demonstrates the inadequacy of both rhythms. In its image and form, Walls maintains this constant element in Irijalba’s work, in which one sees the flowering of a mismatch, breach or failure between ‘human time’ and ‘natural time’, our perpetual and impossible correction of the route.
