DIALOGUES IN NEXT, PINTA'S PLATFORM FOR RETHINKING THE CONTEMPORARY

By Violeta Méndez

In its 2025 edition, the fair unfolds a terrain of questions and encounters. Curated by Juan Canela, NEXT proposes pairings of artists and galleries that explore how we inhabit, name, and imagine the region, articulating new ways of thinking about the contemporary from Latin America and the Caribbean.

December 04, 2025
DIALOGUES IN NEXT, PINTA'S PLATFORM FOR RETHINKING THE CONTEMPORARY

One of the leading fairs dedicated to promoting art from Latin America presents a new edition this year: Pinta Miami 2025. Its sections have remained the same for some time now —Main Section, NEXT, RADAR— but times change quickly, and curatorial approaches must also shift. Juan Canela, Chief Curator of the Museum of Contemporary Art of Panama and member of the Advisory Committee of the Cader Institute of Central American Art at the Reina Sofía, is in charge of NEXT. The section invites galleries that venture into creation and experimentation to work on questions that resonate in Latin American and Caribbean art today: “how we inhabit, how we name, how we imagine what binds us,” he said in conversation with Arte al Día.

 

Galleries must reinvent themselves, question their models, and rethink them in order to work in a “coherent, honest, and professional” way during such complex times. Within this framework, NEXT chooses to bring two galleries together in dialogue at each booth, each presenting one artist for the fair. “There, threads begin to emerge around the construction of landscape, the problematization of identity, the role of women, spirituality, and ancestry,” Canela explained.

One of these dialogues unfolds between Panamanian artist Gabriela Esplá (Galería Mateo Sariel, Panama) and Brazilian artist Alice Ricci (CRUDO, Argentina). Both practices delve into representations of landscape. Through abstraction and gesture, experience and reflection, the artists center the horizons we all share.

 

Dominican artist Laura Castro (Ala Projects, United States) shares a booth with Colombian sculptor Cecilia Ordóñez (Salón Comunal, Colombia), and they too take on the theme of landscape. As Canela described: “together they generate a dialogue rooted in fragmentation, in our relationship with the natural environment, and in the way territory shapes our identities.”

The intimate, the magical, the ancestral, the ritualistic, and the spiritual emerge from the paintings of Panamanian artist Andrea Santos (Galería Arteconsult, Panama) and the textile series by Argentine artist Blanca Machuca (Ceibo Gallery, Miami, United States).

 

“A very beautiful dialogue unfolds between Abigail Reyes [Galería Matia Borgonovo, El Salvador] and Marco Aviña [Encarte Galería, Mexico].” Both delve into popular culture—its wisdom, its sayings, and the everyday rhythms of Latin American life. Within that exchange, the intimate, the personal, and even the dreamlike come to the surface.

NEXT presents a selection of galleries that are rethinking what it means to be a contemporary gallery today.

 

The 19th edition of Pinta Miami will take place from December 4 to 7, 2025, at The Hangar, Coconut Grove, FL (United States).

 

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