As a student at the Royal College of Art in London, David Hockney had already developed an idealized image of America as a mecca for sexual freedom, an image forged between Walt Whitman’s verses and his fascination with Californian beefcake magazines, whose photographs of athletic ephebes inspired the poses of his own models. At that time his formal experimentation owed more to the obscene graffiti of public toilets than to museums. The academic atmosphere was […]
The sexual night of each corresponds to that first scene that we can’t know but to which we owe our existence, and whose secret we will not cease to search unconsciously. Hence behind every image we always look for an underlying image, says Pascal Quignard, who has made of this search the leitmotif of his essayistic journey, traces the cultural nuptials between sex and fear, between the Dream and the Rapture (in love, in death), […]
Among all the living creatures only the human race is free and eccentric, to say of Pico della Mirandola, because her freedom allows her to rise to the supracelestial spheres and at the same time to descent and drown in the mud. His colleague Marsilio Ficino founded in Eros, love, the integrative principle between matter and spirit, between the intelligible and the invisible orders that live beyond the astral world. Because the longing for beauty, […]
May his thick beard not lead us to deceit. Anthony Stark is not a straggler hipster, rather we imagine him a kind of undisciplined disciple of Courbet. But the origin of the world of this nineteenth-century painter is the twilight of Stark’s own, because for him the desire is the prelude to death, his ecstatic announcement, the previous climb to the vertigo of the abyss. Because, as is underlined in his last pictorial series appropiating […]
