ART Oviedo 2024

ART Oviedo | XIV Contemporary Art Fair

ArteOviedo 2024 faces a new edition with the aim of approaching contemporary art from a free perspective, far from conditioning. This year's graphics, by the hand of designer Sergio Llunik , are a direct invitation to do so. From the formal economy of means and an aesthetic indebted to the so-called North American color field painting (Color Field Painting, let us remember Barnett Newman for example) that was created in the middle of the 20th century, Llunik places a child looking at a work that could perfectly belong to the abstract expressionism of the aforementioned trend. The ArteOviedo 2024 poster is, therefore, a call for us to approach the creations shown in the Plaza Trascorrales as COLLECTORS. Collectors of experiences and sensations, abandoning convictions and letting new ideas permeate among those that already shape our adult minds. Ramón Andrés says that "to look is to collect." Let us look and collect then.

Natalia Alonso Arduengo

Art DirectorOviedo 2024

My days soaked

120 x 120 cm., mixed media and collage on canvas

The Lucía Dueñas Gallery participates in ARTE Oviedo, the 14th Oviedo Contemporary Art Fair, with the S olo Project “In the spaces between things...” by the Asturian painter Begmont .

Belén García Montoya (Gijón, 1975). Graduated in Fine Arts in Seville, although she completed her first years of college at the University of Salamanca.

Begmont is the pseudonym she uses to sign her work, and which has been irremediably linked to her since she was born as such.

Over the years, he has accumulated extensive training and has participated in both individual and collective exhibitions in various places in Spain. His work has been exhibited in galleries in Madrid, Seville, Barcelona and Asturias, among others. He collaborates regularly with the publishing houses Delallama and Impronta.

Urban art, comics and illustration are at the genesis of his aesthetics. He usually constructs scenes full of colour, made up of one or several pieces, where a story is told and where there is no aesthetic or thematic separation. Through his works, he tries to make available to the spectator a game between language and drawing and, if possible, that this game leads him to reflection.

Living... in the spaces between things

80 x 120 cm., mixed media and collage on canvas

Begmont 's works are based on words, and words on drawing and colour, thus creating a constant framework that is difficult to separate.

The characters function, at times, as the author's own alter ego and at other times they simply show or establish cartographies of those things in life related to emotions, fears, dreams, expectations, everyday life... This is why her work can be defined as personal and intimate, with a desire to establish itself in the viewer's consciousness, without giving way to evasion.

Brief moments of crowded life

40 x 30 cm each, mixed media and collage on paper

In the spaces between things...

I wanted to talk about routine , about our daily life. Giving it a more poetic and aesthetic sense, thus turning it into something more bearable and easy. As if routine didn't seem like routine. And in that effort, I came across things!! Yes, things, all those objects, clothes, junk, waste... that share space and time with us. They are silent witnesses of our days followed by other days, days full of problems, disagreements, hopes, fears, joys...

And I also discovered a short fragment of the book I was reading at the time, which, without looking for it, accompanied me and helped me in the construction of this series. In Sunset Park (Paul Auster, 2010), one of the characters in this novel was Ellen Brice, a painter, who finds herself lost in her life, lost in her art and her days, and above all, and most tragically, being a painter, lost "in saying nothing." She then understands that she must start over and says:

“I wanted to paint pictures that evoked the quiet wonder of pure objectuality, the sacred ether that breathes in the spaces between things , to express human existence in a meticulous rendering of everything that is out there, beyond us, around us...”

I mean, to speak and to tell, even if I am surrounded and buried by those objects that overwhelm me in my daily life. I am still here in my routine, determined to fight not to say anything. Determined not to lose myself...