Pickings Slim at Pinta Premiere

NEW YORK—The folks who came up with the idea for Pinta: The Contemporary Latin American Art Fair must have thought they were on to a winner. New Yorkers love art fairs, apparently, and in this particular week, when collectors from all over the world are in town for the Latin-American sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s, a fair dedicated to contemporary Latin American can hardly fail, can it?

Indicators have certainly been mixed. There have been successes, including the opening party on Thursday evening, which was a zoo. But when I visited the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea Saturday afternoon, the place felt like a ghost town. Dealers assured me that Friday had been a little busier, and some said clients had indicated that they would be out of town over the weekend and would return at the beginning of the week. But on the basis of that most crucial evidence—sales—Pinta is a fair waiting to happen. Cecilia de Torres Gallery of New York, for example, which occupies one of the plum booths right at the entrance, hadn’t sold anything by Saturday afternoon, and had only one piece reserved.

And with fewer than 40 booths, Pinta looks small. When I mentioned this to Pinta’s institutional director, Mauro Herlitzka, he gave me a predictable “quality not quantity” response, which unfortunately brings us to the fair’s other main problem.

There are some lovely pieces in Pinta, make no mistake. But you really have to go looking for them, because the overriding impression is that the whole of Latin American art-making is swamped by geometrical abstraction. One dealer I spoke with estimated that 80 percent of Pinta falls into that category. Op art, kinetic art, sculptures with lights and mirrors in them, weird three-dimensional constructions, and hanging pieces, they’re all here, like some ghastly throwback to a 1950s New Yorker cartoon’s parody of modern art. A few weeks ago I praised "The Geometry of Hope," a historical show of Latin American art on view at NYU’s Grey Art Gallery, but if geometrical abstraction really has turned into the dead hand of orthodoxy across Latin America that Pinta suggests, then I don’t feel nearly as enthusiastic about it.

So, what else is there? Well, given the circumstances, I couldn’t help but be amused by Mariangeles Soto-Diaz’s pieces from her series “The Divine Geometry of Chocolate,” which are offered by Caracas's Alternativa Elvira Neri Galería de Arte at between $550 and $1,350, and in which the pristine surfaces of geometrical abstraction are seemingly reinvented in chocolate icing. (Actually, it turns out to be paint, but that doesn’t spoil the joke.) The same gallery also has some gorgeous little tragic-romantic constructions by Mari Carmen Carrillo, made from paper and rose thorns. Again, they’re very cheap, between $500 and $4,000.

Very different—and proving that departure from orthodoxy isn’t solely the right of a younger generation—is the one-artist booth dedicated to Xul Solar (1887–1963) and jointly presented by Galería Rubbers Internacional (Solar’s dealer during his lifetime) and Buenos Aires's Museo Xul Solar. A major figure in the history of Latin American art, Solar is less seen in the U.S. than some of us might like, and the opportunity to see what is effectively a small retrospective of his curious, Surrealist-inflected, brightly colored watercolors is quite a treat. The pictures that are not in the permanent collection of the museum are priced here at between $70,000 and $160,000.

Again very different, but no less fascinating, is a series of animation works by Damián Ontiveros Ramirez called One million of good reasons to become millionaire (2007), which are offered by EDS Galería from Condesa, Mexico. These are the product of some hideously complex numerological fantasy derived by the artist from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but the results are delightfully wobbling video pieces that you can purchase with the drawn comic cells from which they were produced. The animations without the drawings are $500 each, but if you go for the drawings as well, then you’re into the number fantasy. If I understand it properly, Ramirez plans to have the series eventually employ a million drawings, valued at $1 each!