At the 12th edition of Uruguay’s Este Arte, held last week in the resort town of José Ignacio, a white gallery wall appeared to have sprung a silver leak. But no clean up was required as it was a metal installation by Brazilian artist Vanderlei Lopes.
In a first for his sculptural practice, Lopes molded aluminum into a petrified torrent, pouring from a hole punched in the wall of Almeida & Dale’s booth so it pooled on the fair’s concrete floor. Small sculptures—painted to resemble Coca-Cola cans, Styrofoam cups, and crumpled paper—seemed to float within the molten flow.
What appeared on first, second, and even third glance to be a newspaper bearing a satellite image of a monstrous hurricane was, in fact, the presentation’s single, actually silver work, with the typeface painstakingly painted on both sides. Polished to a mirror-like gleam, the surfaces of these works pulled visitors into their reflection and, judging by the brisk sales, into their wallets as well.
All together, Lopes’s nine new works spoke to environmental and sociopolitical tensions that run through South America’s past and present, particularly its coastline, where Este Arte is located. Consumerism, ecological waste, and the extractive struggle over mineral resources converge here, a place downstream from the United States—now sharpened by Venezuela’s ongoing destabilization by the US amid an oil-driven geopolitical situation.
The event attracted 5,000 people over its four-day run, where there was productive friction between the fair’s idyllic setting, the gentle camaraderie sustaining its miniature art ecosystem, and the work on view, much of which skewed toward technical precision and conceptual irony. At Aninat Galeria, which has spaces in Chile and London, Chilean artist Germán Tagle presented a new series of liquid-looking landscapes rendered through stencils, in which rivers, foliage, and wetlands collapsed into a single, mutating organism. Without moralizing, the paintings evoked the region’s history of environmental intervention, recalling projects that seek to discipline nature through bioengineering.
Paired with these works were altered reproductions of New York Times front pages: the adoption of the League of Nations, Ireland’s break from the British Empire, and former Mexican president Victoriano Huerta’s refusal to salute the American flag, among them. To each newspaper, Tagel has added wavering brushstrokes that disrupt the historical record, causing different accounts to bleed together.
A detail of Hielo y carbón (2025) by German Tagle presented by Galería Aninat.
Courtesy Galería Aninat and the artist
A similar sense of distortion appeared at Paris-based Galerie Jocelyn Wolff, where Diego Bianchi’s “New Cement Bodies,” an indoor-outdoor sculpture series featuring chimeric figures that sprouted metal pipes and bent beyond physical comprehension. Seen together, the works registered a shared fascination with acts of intervention—political, ecological, and bodily—where efforts to impose a new natural order instead mutated outside expectation.
The 14 exhibitors in this fair mostly brought abstraction. Laura Bardier, the fair’s founder, said ESTE Arte has long favored the approach, a tendency that fits neatly within the region’s art-historical lineage—underscored this year by a revelatory Lucio Fontana exhibition on view at the nearby Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry. It proved to be a safe bet; most of the work on offer sold, the galleries said.
Two strong examples included Piero Atchugarry Gallery’s presentation of Emil Lukas, featuring concentric, spidery weavings that reveal more diaphanous layers the closer one gets, and, at Black Gallery, Francisca Maya’s project “The Dance of the Circle,” a Bauhaus-inflected investigation of the most elemental forms. Trained in design, Maya repeats the circle ad nauseam across fabric and sheets of transparent acrylic, the latter stacked into softly glowing light boxes. The effect is one of perpetual, low-level motion: the booth resembles a field of percolating cells, molecular rather than monumental, psychedelic but side-stepping cancerous associations.
An installation view of “Technorganic Bodies” by Trinidad Metz Brea presented by Valerie’s Factory.
Courtesy Valerie’s Factory
A departure from this abstraction focus was a presentation titled “Technorganic Bodies,” by Valerie’s Factory, one of the youngest galleries participating, founded in Buenos Aires in 2021. The booth was a solo show for Argentine artist Trinidad Metz Brea that would surely turn heads at any fair worldwide. Across marble and wood sculptures and a monumental graphite drawing, which sold during the fair, bats, insects, and other “unloved” creatures, as the gallery described them, staged a violent revenge on humankind. Embrace the grotesque or perish, suggests one drawing of a writhing, many-breasted woman. And embrace it the fair’s affluent audience did: Fundación Amado, a major regional tastemaker based in Guatemala, acquired one of Metz Brea’s works. Here’s hoping future editions of the fair likewise remember the worth of such gnarly beauty in paradise.
