Tag: contemporary art

Postcard from Palermo, Sicily: ‘Crazy enlightenment project’ bridges centuries

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Above: A contemporary overhead walkway sensuously links galleries in a recently renovated 18th-century palace, Palazzo Butera.

At first, I tried to resist, but Francesca insisted, saying, ‘You can fulfill all of your dreams here.’” 

Massimo Valsecchi, interviewed by Elaine Sciolino for an article published in The New York Times on September 26, 2024

We stayed in the Kalsa District, the old Arab quarter in Palermo, for a month in the spring of 2023. This meant we strolled upon a portion of an impressively long tiled veranda addressing the sea numerous times. However, we were clueless about the possibility of visiting the adjacent Palazzo Butera to discover the beauty contained within its walls.

Freshly renovated, the palace did not open its doors to the public as a museum until 2021 and, when we visited, still seemed the city’s best-kept secret. It certainly hadn’t made the guidebooks yet. The New York Times article quoted above nudged me to retrieve this postcard from the backlog of unmailed ones.

‘Everyone said we were mad,’ a serene Francesca Valsecchi admits with a smile as she recalls the decision she and her husband Massimo took in 2015, when they moved from an apartment in Cadogan Square in London to the colossal Palazzo Butera in Palermo…. what Massimo describes as his ‘crazy Enlightenment project.’”

Susan Moore, Apollo Magazine, August 30, 2022

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Postcard from Bilbao, Spain: Vitoria-Gasteiz showcases contemporary art

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Above: Videostills from Soneto de Alimanas, Naomi Rincon Gallardo, 2022, at Artium

Soneto de Alimanas depicts a group of underground, marginal characters who conspire to celebrate ‘delirious entangled re-existences’ amidst a world subjected to the logics of exploitation. It generates a solidarity of rejected beings who communicate across airwaves and defend their existence and the potential driven by their otherness to resist violence and dispossession.”

Curator’s Notes at Artium

It’s hard not to get shoved into the backseat of the artworld when your city lies in the shadow of Bilbao’s Guggenheim. Vitoria-Gasteiz is forty miles away, yet the ambitious leadership of Alava province saw an empty hole – the opportunity to promote the flourishing contemporary art scene of Basque Country.

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Postcard from Oaxaca, Mexico: Richness of contemporary art scene evident at MUPO

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Above: Detail of “Aborregados 6” by Soledad Velasco

The works with acrylic and India ink are a mixture that balances the safe and the unsure, the spontaneity and the calculated. While acrylic is more stable and gives solidity to the work, the pen and water give that feeling of chance, of an accident that must be controlled…. The immediacy and freshness, the lack of control when one decides to drain the water and the necessary control that ends up being exercised, all of this is a metaphor for what each day has in store for us. And in my case, a reminder that nothing is entirely predictable or certain.”

Soledad Velasco

Originally hailing from Oaxaca, artist Soledad Velasco spent 25 years working in Spain before returning home in 2019. Earlier this year, we saw the fruit of her time spent since then in a one-person show, “A Eva,” at Museo de los Pintores Oaxaquenos, or MUPO.

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