COLLECTOR SESSIONS, A NIGHT DEDICATED TO COLLECTORS AT ROLF ART GALLERY

With sympathy and order, Alicia directed the baton of the gathering. From one side to the other she took the conversation through the three collectors invited to share their experiences, strategies and trajectories as art buyers. From left to right, in front of an exclusive audience, Gabriel Vázquez, economist and collector, Alicia de Arteaga, journalist specialized in art -and why not, collector-conductor of Collector Sessions on this occasion, Andrés Brun, entrepreneur and collector, and Eliana Castaño, Colombian collector.

"The axis of this meeting, and what it generates, is to understand that not all of us are cut by the same scissors," Alicia began eloquently, giving her interlocutor's foot. This first comment, although it seems a typical phrase, is essential to understand the acquisition of art-works. All of them, Eliana, as Andrés and Gabriel, possess fascinating art collections, although all very different. The Colombian collector claimed to have a weakness for photographs, obsession she discovered when she saw that half of her collection consisted of photographic works, Vázquez, on the other hand, owns a pieces done by artists with a larger career, he even explains that many of the artists he bought have already passed to a better life. The objective of this comparison is to show that the purchase of art - although it can become an investment over time - should not be thought in financial terms. "You are going to live with the work, it is necessary to generate a link with it. Otherwise it's like getting married to a terrible man, just for money”, says Eliana while laughing, explaining that in her home the works inhabit the house and embrace her.

In relation to contemporary art, another important axis of the meeting, Arteagas paraphrased Picasso, pointing out the importance of buying artists of our time: "In this way both, they and their work grow with those who buy it", she described. Vázquez, meanwhile, explained the need to look all the time, even when you allready bought something. Observe. "There are things that I bought that I could not, nor would I want to buy again. The experience of looking is more interesting to me, nowadays we interpellate works in very different ways than we did before", he adds, emphasizing the new ways in which contemporary art passes through us, and the importance of not buying with the ears , if not through perception. Brun, who as well as being an entrepreneur is a member of the Espigas Foundation (as well as Gabriel Vázquez) remarked that despite his researcher vocation in his way of acting, his entry into the artistic scene assuming the role of collector has managed to break certain schemes. "Collecting works is a process of curiosity that constantly feeds back", said Brun, adding, "Unlike my life outside the role of collector, around art I have an experiential experience”. 

Finally, with a closing full of applause and thanks, collectors, artists and friends shared a glass of wine and became an illustration of a new paradigm mentioned by Alicia de Arteaga during the Collector Sessions: each day more artists, who in other times were secluded in their studies and appeared only in bohemian bubbles, appear today as the protagonists of the scene. Without going any further, an example of this was the reopening of the Moderno (Art Museum of Buenos Aires).