Salón ACME and Its New Sculpture Courtyard: “As Useless as a Flower is Useless”

There is much that is labyrinthine in Salón ACME. The interconnected buildings of General Prim 30 and 32, in Colonia Juárez, have become a hallmark of the fair. This year, for its eighth edition, we find new designs in the space. The central courtyard is no longer a recreational space; where visitors used to meet to talk, eat, and have a drink, there is now a Sculpture Courtyard. It will accommodate large-format installations.

In the year of its debut, this place hosts a colossal, dynamo-like installation that magnetizes the eyes. Pablo Dávila manufactured it specifically for the salón: a column of ten rings, three meters in diameter, stacked horizontally, one after the other, up to the top of the construction. In each, the artist has reproduced with neon white lights certain phrases written by Oscar Wilde in 1890. The narrative refers to a letter that the Irish writer addressed to a young reader, explaining in more detail the meaning of the phrase “all art is quite useless,” present in the preface to his novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Wilde writes:

“A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy…Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse. All this is I fear very obscure.”

Dávila transcribed the entire letter in English, everything from its semicolons to its farewell and signature, in an ascending sequence of sentences. Letter by letter, our gaze ends up at the top floor of General Prim 30. To decipher the message, one has to walk counter-clockwise, again and again, from the ground to the top floor, until reaching the tenth line. The piece illuminates every corner with a force of light so unwavering that the experience exceeds meaning, proving to be hypnotic.

Other Spaces

In the rooms around the Sculpture Courtyard we find pieces by the 58 artists selected from the Open Call for proposals, as well the works making up Bodega ACME, an exhibition curated by BASE Proyectos, showing works by artists who have participated in previous editions of the fair.

Across the hall dividing the two buildings, in the space for Invited Projects, the Galería del Paseo presents works by the Peruvian artist Sylvia Fernández: dark oil paintings on small- and medium-size canvases that seem to float in what was once the bathroom of this Porfirian mansion. Patricia Conde Galería has followed suit with photographs by the Dominican-born artist residing in Monterrey, Alejandro Cartagena. On the top floor, the team from MAIA Contemporary embeds a white acrylic into the sides of a door frame. Thus, up to the last detail, all is ready for every installation to be discovered inside the labyrinth. A real treat!