Random Principle & Serendipity

Selecting a group of artists from the context of a fair as renowned and frequented as ARCO/Madrid is not an easy task. More than two hundred national and international galleries exhibit their artists and proposals in a kind of endless cacophony of images and ideas, media and techniques, shapes and colours that, however, offer us an endless journey of combinations and the opportunity to imagine and establish our own virtual/mental exhibition. With the help of Octavio Zaya, who has collaborated with ARCO —as a curator, lecturer, and jury—throughout the 42 years of the different editions of the fair, and from his extensive and recognized work in important international meetings (documenta11, Johannesburg Biennial, Havana Biennial, Venice Biennale or Sharjah Biennial) and more than 50 exhibitions in museums and international institutions, the task turns out to be a less daunting challenge.

For the most part, the list of artists selected for Random Principle & Serendipity—this virtual exhibition organized by ITGallery—is part of the works that the galleries present at the fair. But the selection is neither hierarchical nor canonical, nor is it intended to be a paradigm for what should or should not be included in a representative sample of ARCO's offers. On the contrary, the selection responds to what we could understand as “visual thought”, which differs from the general, neurotypical trend, where words, not images, establish, shape and develop thought. Despite being immersed in visual culture, the dominant culture is determined by the verbal: curators, lecturers, critics, specialists and connoisseurs who try to "approach" or "translate" what we see with words, displacing the divergent visual thinking that the arts offer us in general.

Random Principle & Serendipity proposes to develop among the echoes, tangents and correlations of the artists' works; between the interstices, the folds and the fugues of the convergences and divergences of these works and between what explores ideas of what remains, of the fragmentary and the hybrid from the constant re-combination of forms and visual materials. The list of selected artists and works is presented, then, as if it were a folded page from the fair, where any answer to the recurring question about the difference between reality and art vanishes in our visual thinking.