Fictocritical Encounters: Rethinking Criticality and Writing in Contemporary Art

A Public Programme lecture with David Maroto

In recent years, an ongoing debate has emerged regarding the inadequacy of the critical language used to address contemporary art – whether manifest in the crisis of art criticism, the phenomenon of International Art English, or the conventions of curatorial prose. In this context, fictocritical writing appears as a potential escape from the impasse of the current textual model.

Fictocritical writing is a transdisciplinary practice that seeks to dissolve the traditional distinctions between fiction and criticism, theory and practice, research and literature. David Maroto’s postdoctoral research project focuses on the potential of this mode of experimental writing to produce a sort of knowledge that is embodied, situated, and animated by a playful attitude.

The project is structured as a series of encounters with salient authors, such as Michael Taussig, Lynne Tillman, and Chris Kraus. These personal interactions are aimed at unravelling their particular motivations by means of oral transmission, which are subsequently reworked into written form. The intention is not only to write about fictocriticism, but to write fictocritically. This is a practice-based research project, where writing becomes methodological and the research questions are explored through the production of a text that performs its own subject matter – blurring the boundaries between style and content, art practice and research.

David Maroto is a Spanish visual artist based in the Netherlands. He completed a PhD from the Edinburgh College of Art, with a research project called The Artist’s Novel: The Novel as a Medium in the Visual Arts, which is the first to explore in depth the subject of the artist’s novel. It has been published in a two-volume book in English (Mousse Publishing, 2020) and Spanish (Greylock Editorial, 2025).

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