Start as you mean to go on… Here we go. And now it’s certainly going.
Congratulations to Carla Arocha + Stéphane Schraenen on the opening of their solo show ‘Floop’ at Galeria Fermay coinciding with Mallorca’s La Nit de l’Art 2022.
The show and the gallery are a very poignant moment for us: Toni is one of us. And we are absolutely thrilled that he has embarked on the great adventure of opening his own gallery and that it’s such a robust contribution to the cultural life of Mallorca, whence (yes, I used “whence” in a sentence) he hails, an island with a unique age-old heritage of topnotch cultural expression.
Toni Ferrer Mayol first met Carla Arocha + Stéphane Schraenen as an emerging curator when working in London following his postgraduate studies in the UK. He subsequently worked with them on various projects with fellow curator Ken Pratt, including playing a key role in realising their ambitious and demanding intervention at The Wallace Collection, one of the supposedly “unrealisable” projects Ken and Toni managed to pull off while delivering a unique initiative for the Dutch embassy and Flemish Representation’s innovative cultural diplomacy strategies in London at that time.
He subsequently worked on various projects with the artist duo together with Ken Pratt. The mutual respect he and the artists developed through these projects meant that he went on to curate key projects focused on their work and practice, notably during his tenure as director of Galería Maior. In this capacity, in 2019, he presented Arocha+Schraenen’s first solo show in Mallorca, to critical acclaim and popular enthusiasm.
If any curator can claim to have earned his stripes, born out of fire, with this artist duo, it’s Toni (don’t ask). It’s especially heartwarming to see him open his gallery’s season with a solo by Carla and Stéphane and even more pleasing to see that it’s such a great show.
2022 has been a busy year for Antwerp-based Carla Arocha + Stéphane Schraenen, with the solo show at Galeria Fermay following being included in its opening group show Here We Go, and hot on the heels of a solo show at Galerie Parisa Kind in Frankfurt am Main.
We raise our hats and my glasses to you lovelies. Salud! Proost! Slàinte!
