Last Friday, October 8, 2021, the MEAM hosted the joint awards ceremony of the most important contests in the figurative art scene, the 11th International Painting and Sculpture Competition Figurativas 2021 of the Arts and Artists Foundation, and the 15th ARC International Salon of Art Renewal Center.

The most interesting thing about contests, contests or groups, is not deciding who is the best among those who present themselves, but rather that it is possible to create a forum in which the best that is being produced at that moment is represented and is end up being able to generate a global sample of the most interesting among what is being created in the field of the contest. Only in this way, an encounter of this type serves to learn and to advance.

The important thing about this contest is not to choose the winner - that's why we already eliminated this formula in its day - but to make it clear that, even in a time when the image of painting and sculpture is so reviled in its most traditional concept, there is a level powerful and very valuable general, growing and extended by the most diverse countries, on a scale that was difficult to imagine.

If this initiative is of any use, it is to keep high the banner of great Art, the aspiration to the best of ourselves, without conforming only to what is possible. The certification of the does not renounce anything. The will to continue on the path of the European tradition, now global. Coming from the most diverse countries, we gather here a series of works —many of them by still unknown authors— of undoubted value due to the formal commitment they represent, interesting contributions to a universal language, a bastion against the chaos of forms in which the world ended up degenerating. experimentation of the last century, and that is still dragging on without a clear course to follow ...