Next May Swinton Gallery celebrates nine years of activity since its launch in 2014. The architects of the project are Goyo Villasevil and Sergio Bang, who have directed and managed the gallery since its origins. During the art week you can enjoy in their space of Todo es número, an exhibition by Guido Bisagni (108) and, in addition, Swinton Gallery will be present at the UVNT art fair with another of their artists: Sergio Gómez (SRGER). The following is the result of a conversation with Goyo Villasevil.

I

ALBERTO AGUILAR: A gallery's activity should be based on restlessness, curiosity and taste. Is the proposal of Swinton Gallery (SG) disturbing and unconventional? If so, in what sense, what do you delight in, what characterises your aesthetic approach within the programme?

GOYO VILLASEVIL: What makes SG special is how we have changed during our nine years of activity. We began by documenting the art we found on the street and generated a gallery project from it. Over time, our experience in the art world and knowledge of the art market has transformed our curatorial decisions. Before, it was very important for artists to intervene in the street. We saw how they developed projects with very compact narratives: with previous research and with a message to convey to society through their work. Now we are also interested in creators who do not work in the street, but who are immersed in the interactions between the different urban actors. That's what we are curious about and that's what we focus on.

Aesthetically we have also evolved. While at the beginning we were more interested in the literal and the message, later we have leaned towards the non-obvious. A transition from the obvious to the abstract. And also a move from the pictorial to the three-dimensional, to what is no longer purely flat on a wall. This is exemplified by our collaboration with DosJotas: a political artist who generates interventions that modify urban contexts in which painting has no place, or if it does, it is only in a specific form. SG is currently one of the most important galleries in terms of abstraction and public art. This binomial makes our proposal unconventional.

II

AA: Through the selection of artists and projects, what message does SG convey about our times? Or in other words... With your artists' exhibitions, what do you explain about the world we live in?

GV: We speak in proximity, not in generality. One of the fundamental things that we need and that led us to open the gallery is to interact with people who have advanced thinking about what is happening and to experience it up close. I'm not talking about big models, but about the intimacy of individuals. The creative process says what happens in our relationship with others: with society. On the other hand, the fact that there are individuals who want to express what is happening and don't do it because they are attracted by other trends or simply desperate because they can't get ahead explains the world we live in.

III

AA: From the point of view of art and culture, the diagnosis and denunciation of our ills have been carried out to a great extent. It seems clear what is wrong with our society. The question is: If art has the capacity to arrogate to itself a fiction that generates a real substratum, is it pertinent for an artist to evoke reality without saying anything about it? Shouldn't artistic practice create "things" instead of describing them?

GV: There is one thing that bothers me a lot in the art circuit: that groups are created. It seems to figurative artists that abstracts don't have technique. What's more: there are many people who are only interested in the figurative and the literal, and who condemn the abstract for not contributing that denunciation you're talking about. At the same time, the work of abstract artists denounces the figurative for being obvious and for not evoking places of pure speculation. It makes no sense whatsoever. Nobody is right.

For example, artist 108 currently has an exhibition at SG, Todo es número (Everything is number). The artist uses the generation of geometric spaces in his painting based on mathematical formulas to tell something about what is happening to us at the moment. But it is not self-evident. The process of analysis and investigation of what is happening he shows it in a way that is absolutely abstract, that is pure mathematics.

This online conversation and so many others are ones and zeros, it is applied mathematics. With his exposition, 108 tells us that this applied mathematics that generates capitalist profits has another version: that it is pure mathematics, Pythagorean mathematics. Mathematics as something transcendent: something that does not have an application in the material but in the spiritual. Guido Bisagni (108) talks about how those ones and zeros, that mathematics traps us. It takes us out of one reality to get us into another that is not even the one we generate with our pure thought, it is the one they lead us to: that we are connected all day long, consuming through the telephone, etcetera.

And the artist shows it through paintings in which there is no telephone, in which there is no purely anti-capitalist or anti-system message, but which somehow invite us to carry out that meditation: that thought about what is happening. And it is abstract painting. There are sectors of the art circle that denigrate abstract painting because it has no story, no content and because it is a mere aesthetic expression. And they are wrong.

108 shows that behind the abstraction there is a story, a content and a way of seeing the world that tells us that there are other possibilities within, on the periphery or on the margins of the system. It is the non-obvious. It is a recreated reality different from what we see all day long. It is not the representation of a person looking in a rubbish bin. In my opinion, it is an abstract representation that, in the end, tells us about the person looking in the dustbin.

IV

AA: The crudeness of our surroundings means that we need a high dose of anaesthesia for our daily lives. As a result, perhaps the public of our time lacks the naivety that the artist needs for his work to make an impact: both to move or surprise and to be understood. Let's talk about it.

GV: In terms of the audience and the emotion that can be generated in the audience. There are so many greys. In SG we attract many types of public: clients who are collectors and those who can't afford to buy. Many of the artists we work with give their work away: they paint in the street in a natural way and put something on a wall that they think should be there. This attracts a public that is not only interested in buying, but in enjoying the artist's work, and also wants to discover what he or she is capable of doing in the studio. These people admire the artist's personality, the way he or she does things. And how they live. It is important if the artist is part of the LGTB collective, or of a collective that has a feeling of spirituality, or if the artist is a political activist, or if he or she has a life experience that astonishes.

On the other hand, there are people who are looking for something to put behind their face as a background. This is something that happens in museums, at fairs and in the street. They want to say I had that thing behind me; you don't. They just want that nice thing behind them. They just want that nice thing behind them. They don't have an interest in who made it, or what their motivation was. They want to know the life experience of the person who created it. This, of course, happens in galleries, and it happens to us: they don't know who is exhibiting and they just want a photo in front of a painting. It's a sign of the times. How do you surprise these people? By the spectacle. The spectacular work is the one that surprises, it's the one that gets the photo in the end. A work that is a text, or a documentation of how the LGTB population was imprisoned in prisons in the 40s and 50s in Spain, that handwritten document is not very spectacular and is not going to get many selfies. And, probably, what is going to happen with this exhibition is that it is going to have few visitors. Only people who are interested in the story. That's the way it is. You have to live with it.

But there is hope. I remember a family who usually comes with their daughter to SG. They analyse the paintings and look at them. It happens: there are people who leave amazed. Or they are struck by the technique, or the content, or the symbolism, or the story of the work. Some people visit the 108 exhibition and tell you: it's pure transcendental meditation. There is hope and I still believe that there are people who can be surprised. Not a high percentage of the population, but I don't think art has ever been very massive. There is because there are still people who like to be outside the mainstream and the massive flows of people going in the same direction. We have to explain all this well to young people because they are capable of understanding it. They are not sheep who spend their days on IG or TikTok.

V

AA: Of which artists would you say that their work is full of the impression that they have really seen or felt something? Of which artists would you say that every pore of what they imagine or contemplate happens in their work: because it manages to translate artistically?

GV: The artist is not the image that hangs on a wall, but the relationship of that piece/image with the person who generates it. He has to have poured into that work everything he is, the experiences he has had, the way he sees the world, the way he would like the world to be, even if it is utopian, because all that utopia is the advance guard of the new reality. To ask for impossible worlds is to get closer to them. In this sense, Olga de Dios seems fundamental to me. The work of Andrés Senra, of Dosjotas, of 108, or of Sergio Gómez (SRGER). All these artists are including themselves in their work and, in some way, their life and their being are there. For me that's what's valuable about the people we work with.

Artists who generate beautiful work, but who don't include themselves. They don't interest us. It's a constant in all the artists we work with. We need the artist with whom we are going to share our time and efforts to work as hard as we do. The skin is in that two- or three-dimensional image, in that installation, in that story they generate.

VI

AA: A week of art fairs in Madrid in sight. Let's talk about the industry... Although the logic of a fair is mercantile, there are those who defend that an art fair should not only concentrate on creating an ideal framework for the buying and selling of works, but also present itself as a cultural platform: from mere commercial interaction to the exchange of knowledge and experiences to correct, improve, transform the world. What are the ins and outs of a fair?

GV: As for fairs, I'll tell you about a book by Remedios Zafra, El entusiasmo (The Enthusiasm). The author distinguishes pure and real enthusiasm from figurative enthusiasm. And I believe that there are fairs that have a pure and real enthusiasm for art and other fairs whose enthusiasm is figurative.

The pure and real one is found in those fairs that feel the need for the contents or stories generated from different thoughts about reality to be present and give them visibility, at the risk of their own stability. And there are other fairs, however, that have a figurative enthusiasm because they pretend to have such an intention. There are some fairs that, effectively, have a real interest in art being useful in an abstract way, and there are others in it being useful only in a capitalist, practical or monetary sense.

But this is very dangerous and I know it. A fair must be a market. Confronting the market causes the fairs to have problems. When projects are generated that forget that a fair is a market and dedicate themselves only to content and narrative... there is a problem. This contradiction causes problems for the fair. And surely the fairs that are only dedicated to the market and that have that unreal enthusiasm for content and storytelling are more successful. This success is of course interesting for many galleries.

I would be interested in an intermediate model. I think this happens more in institutional fairs. I'm referring to those that have economic support from public institutions (local, regional governments, etc.) that can generate projects with less need for monetisation. These institutional fairs, when they are well curated and when they have a purely conceptual and narrative objective, are very attractive. But of course, fairs without institutional support can't cover the costs of the non-commercial exhibition of art.

Precisely what differentiates ARCO from the satellite fairs is the institutional support that the former receives. None of the satellite fairs is going to steal a gallery from ARCO, it's never going to happen, it could be that ARCO doesn't accept a gallery and it goes to another fair. What there is is elbowing between the satellite fairs to take the galleries and there is theft, there are offers for the galleries to go to one fair and not to another. Because in Spain there aren't so many of us, the fairs have few potential clients.

GOYO VILLASEVIL (Madrid, 1974) holds a degree in Image Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid. He began his professional career in the audiovisual sector, producing advertising and editing feature films, winning various awards and mentions. Photographer and serigrapher, he is getting into the world of contemporary art, mainly in the art circuit that has a clear connection with the current public space. In 2014, together with Sergio Bang, he founded Swinton Gallery in Madrid's Lavapiés neighbourhood. Since then Swinton Gallery promotes, represents and commercialises the work of national and international artists such as Andrés Senra, Sergio Gómez (Srger), Olga de Dios or Guido Bisagni (108), among others. He collaborates in specialised magazines and has prefaced different books such as Ellas, by photographer JEOSM, or Street Art guide Madrid, by Thomas Martin Groetschnig. He also gives lectures on art and public space, most recently in the context of the MNCARS collecting conference in Madrid.

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