randian asked Patrick Waldburger, a young Brussels gallerist, to comment on this year’s Artissima.

In Europe, Artissima is the last art fair in the annual art circus calendar and it comes after the frenzy of FIAC and Frieze. It’s not easy for an art fair to keep up against such competition but Artissima convincingly does so by defining its own style and rhythm. Sarah Cosulich Canarutto, Artissima’s director since last year, continues to further develop and refine a profile that already her predecessor, Francesco Manacorda (now the director of Tate Liverpool), began to lay out.

Artissima isn’t the fair of big-name artists. Of course, you find them there too, but to a very limited extent. Artissima mainly highlight emerging positions; it is an art fair for art discoveries. Galleries applying for Artissima are aware of it and bring artistic ideas they wish to unveil to a larger and sophisticated art crowd.

In the fair section “Back to the Future”, for example, galleries can feature artists that were already active decades ago, but whose work isn’t commonly known. This year, ShanghART gallery (Shanghai, Beijing, and Singapore) put a spotlight on a work by the Chinese artist Geng Jianyi called “Forms and Certificates”. It consists of a series of said forms and certificates that belonged to attendees of a conference on art that took place in 1988 in Huangshan. Galerie Thomas Fischer from Berlin presented works by Brian O’Doherty (born 1928) who is also the author of the seminal essay “Inside the White Cube” that was published in Artforum in 1976 and both an early and profound analysis of the space in which art is now commonly exhibited. The other sections of the fair present mainly a young program, like my own, Galerie Waldburger (a solo presentation with Berlin-based video artist Eli Cortiñas).

Artissima can very much be compared to the culinary delicacies and the eating habits of Torino and its province, the Piemont, famous for its truffles and the Slow Food movement. The attitude of the fair is also slow in the sense that the art presented is far from being fast consumable “bling-bling” art and the visitors of Artissima take their time and are curious and have a taste for new art positions. Artissima is the place to look out for (yet) hidden art truffles. And as the last edition of Artissima proves, curators and savvy international collectors are aware of it, for they flocked in by masses.