Art Madrid'26 – RODRIGO JUARRANZ: A COMMITMENT TO INNOVATION AND CONTEMPORARY PRESENT

Rodrigo Juarranz, founded in Aranda de Duero in 2006 under the slogan "Art within everyone's reach", has focused its exhibition activity on supporting the most recent art, promoting exhibition projects by artists with innovative trends belonging to both the national and international sphere. Juarranz is committed to both established and emerging artists, as long as their work pursues innovation within contemporary art, both from a thematic and technical point of view.

In this edition of Art Madrid, the gallery presents the work of six contemporary artists who stand out for their multi-disciplinary nature. Amélie Ducommun, Beatriz Díaz Ceballos, Diego Benéitez, Jaime Sicilia, Jorge Marín and Marcos Tamargo, are the artists who will be exhibiting at Rodrigo Juarranz's booth.

Marcos Tamargo

De la tierra al cielo, 2019

Oil on board

180 x 180cm

Marcos Tamargo (Gijón, Asturias, 1982), the flagship artist of Rodrigo Juarranz Gallery, develops his artistic activity between the United States and Europe. A great connoisseur of conventional techniques, he has been the creator of an innovative procedure, which the author himself has designated as "Move-Art". It consists of generating on the same support two different works, one will be perceived by the spectator in a conventional way, while the other will be visible only with black light. His recent series of portraits dedicated to women who have been awarded the Nobel Prize throughout history and those who will receive it in the future have been developed with this technique. Marie Sklodowska-Curie was the first woman portrayed in this series.

The Asturian artist had already experimented with this technique in his series of portraits of the Princess of Asturias Awards, which he began in 2011, portraying among others Leonard Cohen or Haile Gebrselaise. In 2012 he portrayed architect Rafael Moneo and footballers Iker Casillas and Xabi Hernández.

Rodrigo Juarranz is the only gallery that represents in Spain the Mexican Jorge Marín, an artist that during his career has developed a figurative work that is catalogued among the most important of the contemporary art in Mexico. In his search for identity, and after experimenting with multiple disciplines and materials, Jorge Marín opts for bronze and from there on, all his work is configured under this noble and traditional material that allows him to generate in his pieces an extremely mimetic appearance to the elements of the living matter he represents. His formats oscillate between miniature and monumentality, the latter taking over public spaces, in which he establishes a conversation with the spectator which art, as he himself confesses, "is an indispensable tool for generating more reflexive and peaceful societies".

Amélie Ducommun

Caja 1, 2019

Mixta sobre papel

26 x 26cm

Amélie Ducommun (Barcelona, 1983) presents her delicate art boxes. Amélie represents nature in her works by means of a textured line of colour where she composes the landscape and the natural elements that are interrelated in it. All this from the questionable perspective of memory. Some representations are placed on the surface of the boxes, which in turn serve as a monstrance, in the manner of archives that endure.

Beatriz Díaz Ceballos (Oviedo, 1971), delights us in this fair with a proposal in which literature materialises in three-dimensional plastic works, where the book goes from being the literary support to becoming a material component of merely plastic art. The books vomit words and are transformed into sculptural forms of great beauty or generate forests that emerge from their imaginary interior. The letters are materialized by means of copper micro-fusions in which they acquire the nature of original sculptures that generate beautiful visual poems.

Beatriz Díaz Ceballos

Torre I, 2015

Mixed media

15 x 26cm

Diego Benéitez (Zamora, 1986), began his exhibition career a decade ago and is one of the artists that Rodrigo has trusted, since years ago, to present his latest creations in Art Madrid. The artist from Zamora, executes in his works a compendium between the figuration and the abstraction, capturing in his tables covered by one of the most traditional techniques of the painting, the oil, some subtle landscapes in which the simplicity of the symbols that form it, being reduced sometimes to the horizontality of the application of the colour, manage to contribute to the work a solemnity so vehement that it makes us submerge in them.

The interdisciplinary artist Jaime sicilia (Madrid, 1970), works between media as varied as painting, sculpture, photography or video. Sicily participates with his series "Waldweben", where we can see the variety and confluence of materials and techniques that he uses in his works. Acrylics, pigments and photographic emulsions are displayed on wooden, metal or plastic supports to create a subtle reality that takes us into the mysterious Wagner forest.

Diego Benéitez

El recuerdo que despierta, 2019

Oil on board

120 x 120cm

Jaime Sicilia

Waldweben 09, 2019

13 Broken Blatt and metal and plastic support

140 x 140cm

 


ART MADRID’26 INTERVIEW PROGRAM. CONVERSATIONS WITH ADONAY BERMÚDEZ


The work of Cedric Le Corf (Bühl, Germany, 1985) is situated in a territory of friction, where the archaic impulse of the sacred coexists with a critical sensibility characteristic of contemporary times. His practice is grounded in an anthropological understanding of the origin of art as a foundational gesture: the trace, the mark, the need to inscribe life in the face of the awareness of death.

The artist establishes a complex dialogue with the Spanish Baroque tradition, not through stylistic mimicry, but through the emotional and material intensity that permeates that aesthetic. The theatricality of light, the embodiment of tragedy, and the hybridity of the spiritual and the carnal are translated in his work into a formal exploration, where underlying geometry and embedded matter generate perceptual tension.

In Le Corf’s practice, the threshold between abstraction and figuration is not an opposition but a site of displacement. Spatial construction and color function as emotional tools that destabilize the familiar. An open methodology permeates this process, in which planning coexists with a deliberate loss of control. This allows the work to emerge as a space of silence, withdrawal, and return, where the artist confronts his own interiority.


The Fall. 2025. Oil on canvas.195 × 150 cm.


In your work, a tension can be perceived between devotion and dissidence. How do you negotiate the boundary between the sacred and the profane?

In my work, I feel the need to return to rock art, to the images I carry with me. From the moment prehistoric humans became aware of death, they felt the need to leave a trace—marking a red hand on the cave wall using a stencil, a symbol of vital blood. Paleolithic man, a hunter-gatherer, experienced a mystical feeling in the presence of the animal—a form of spiritual magic and rituals linked to creation. In this way, the cave becomes sacred through the abstract representation of death and life, procreation, the Venus figures… Thus, art is born. In my interpretation, art is sacred by essence, because it reveals humankind as a creator.


Between Dog and Wolf II. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.


Traces of the Spanish Baroque tradition can be seen in your work. What do you find in it that remains contemporary today?

Yes, elements of the Spanish Baroque tradition are present in my work. In the history of art, for example, I think of Arab-Andalusian mosaics, in which I find a geometry of forms that feels profoundly contemporary. In Spanish Baroque painting and sculpture, one recurring theme is tragedy: death and the sacred are intensely embodied, whether in religious or profane subjects, in artists such as Zurbarán, Ribera, El Greco, and also Velázquez. I am thinking, for example, of the remarkable equestrian painting of Isabel of France, with its geometry and nuanced portrait that illuminates the painting.

When I think about sculpture, the marvelous polychrome sculptures of Alonso Cano, Juan de Juni, or Pedro de Mena come to mind—works in which green eyes are inlaid, along with ivory teeth, horn fingernails, and eyelashes made of hair. All of this has undoubtedly influenced my sculptural practice, both in its morphological and equestrian dimensions. Personally, in my work I inlay porcelain elements into carved or painted wood.


Between Dog and Wolf I. 2025. Oil on canvas. 97 × 70 cm.


What interests you about that threshold between the recognizable and the abstract?

For me, any representation in painting or sculpture is abstract. What imposes itself is the architectural construction of space, its secret geometry, and the emotion produced by color. It is, in a way, a displacement of the real in order to reach that sensation.


The Anatomical Angel. 2013. Ash wood and porcelain. 90 × 15 × 160 cm.


Your work seems to move between silence, abandonment, and return. What draws you toward these intermediate spaces?

I believe it is by renouncing the imitation of external truth, by refusing to copy it, that I reach truth—whether in painting or in sculpture. It is as if I were looking at myself within my own subject in order to better discover my secret, perhaps.


Justa. 2019. Polychrome oak wood. 240 × 190 × 140 cm.


To what extent do you plan your work, and how much space do you leave for the unexpected—or even for mistakes?

It is true that, on occasions, I completely forget the main idea behind my painting and sculpture. Although I begin a work with very clear ideas—preliminary drawings and sketches, preparatory engravings, and a well-defined intention—I realize that, sometimes, that initial idea gets lost. It is not an accident. In some cases, it has to do with technical difficulties, but nowadays I also accept starting from a very specific idea and, when faced with sculpture, wood, or ceramics, having to work in a different way. I accept that.