MODELING MAYHEM

What do a junk-store rendering of Picasso’s Guernica, a mathematical modeling of the surface of a naan bread, vases assembled from leather offcuts using parametric processes, minimalist lamps made from seashells, and an anamorphic portrait of Goebbels have in common? The answer is Mayrit, the Madrid design, art, and architecture biennial, which brought them all together for its 2026 edition.

Dispersed across the Spanish capital, the biennial’s fourth outing saw Portuguese critical-studies professor Eduarda Neves and Canadian artist and critic Mohammad Salemy curate a selection of displays, interventions, and talks under the titillating title (Super)Models. But rather than Cindy, Christy, Naomi, and Linda, visitors encountered propositions that seek to explore how models — mathematical, computational, societal, architectural, etc. — sometimes outstrip their creators’ intentions and “start producing the world they were built to describe.”

Rather than a methodical dissection of the phenomenon, (Super)Models painted an impressionistic portrait of our current moment. As algorithm angst bubbles over into large-language-model crisis mode, “reality” is more unstable than ever. For art critic Dean Kissick, one of the guest speakers, we have now reached “Postmodernism 2.0 (because of AI, all the claims, theses, and observations of Postmodernism are repeating themselves). The chains of signification are broken — signs, symbols, and images no longer refer back to reality, but only to themselves.”

It certainly felt like history was looping back on itself at Madrid’s Matadero arts complex, where the main Mayrit show included Babak Golkar’s Sellers Goebbels (2017), a multimedia work that draws parallels between Hitler’s propaganda czar and American public-relations pioneer Edward Bernays (who happened to be Freud’s nephew), both masters in the art of mass persuasion. Also looking back to the 1930s, Adad Hannah’s Mayrit Guernica (2026), specially made for the biennial from thrift-store finds, reactivates a shopworn antiwar image for our ever-more bellicose age. On the other hand, Abbas Zahedi’s Naan Binary [final form] highlights a very contemporary condition by pairing a digital twin of the titular bread with a recording in video form. When even its most banal aspects are mirrored virtually, our world becomes a Through the Looking Glass mise en abyme that sends us spiraling down ever more vertiginous rabbit holes.

Over at the Museo Nacional de Artes Decorativas, Saúl Baeza and VISIONS BY’s IBEX36. Material Culture = Global Value (2026) plugs the museum’s collection into global data flows via an algorithmic model that estimates each object’s financial value based on real-time raw-material exchange rates — a portrait of neoliberalism that will no doubt appeal to artwork burglars. Meanwhile, design in the more classic sense could be found in small galleries around town, such as Moneo Brock’s Space to Be, where Antônio Frederico Lasalvia showed his collection Materia Prima. Using a method he describes as “a scrap theory of form,” he developed a standardized parametric model that allows him to make individually unique vases from random leather offcuts. The strangely compelling results show how digital tools might render a profligate industrial model — the manufacture of luxury leather goods — a little less wasteful. Meanwhile, over at VNT, Ludovico Grantaliano showed a lighting installation shaded by nacred mollusk shells, named MADRE (as in mother of pearl). Were it not so poetically delicate, this defiantly analogue intervention, which mixes custom electrics with Mother Nature’s bounty, would surely count as the design equivalent of comfort food, a reassuring moment of low-tech calm among the ambient mayhem.