Hypocrisy, a street which both begins and ends in the world, and there is scarcely anyone who doesn’t have, if not a house, then at least rooms or temporary lodgings along the length of it. A suspicious old man and a trusting young one walk to this main street of the world to observe closely habits and customs of their peers. To cross certain thresholds to see The world from inside, as Quevedo did in […]
Pasolini recalled from his student days an occasion when he was contemplating with friends a fireflies’ dance a night without moonlight. That experience was recorded in his conscience as a premonition of a nearby decline. Two decades later, he would confirm the «disappearance of the fireflies» in an Italy drowned in the fascism of the media, that in his opinion was more terrifying than the one established by Mussolini. Speaking metaphorically, the fireflies were for Pasolini bodies […]
The fragile boundary between art and pornography has always worried scholars, museographers and guarantors of morality, which from the mid-nineteenth century, when the category «obscenity» assumed a legal status in England, gave rise to countless proceedings, committees and reviews of the illicit. In the midst of the sexual liberation, what happened inside the courts seemed insulated in a bubble, alien to the radical changes that were affecting even the meaning of art. In the Longford […]
Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (Roman tomb epitaph, Epicurean principle: I did not exist, I existed, I do not exist, I do not care). Epicureanism revealed the nonsense of all fears with […]
Failed sculptures, false monuments, fallen idols, fanatics and misfits, big feet and delirious brains. Enrique Marty expresses over and over again the «sense of failure» (Sense of failure was the title of one of his latest shows), the absurdity and the misunderstanding that, far from jamming the gears of the world, lubricates them. But not all is lost. If there is one thing the Salamancan artist believes in, it is catharsis — that fear and […]
Alors vous lui réapprendrez à danser à l’envers comme dans le délire des bals musette et cet envers sera son véritable endroit, Antonin Artaud It was back in the 1930’s when Antonin Artaud was in and out of asylums; in the same decade, Carol Rama went daily to visit her mother admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The encounter with sick bodies and confinement conditions inspired her first watercolors. In 1945, Rama celebrates her first exhibition […]
What took its name from a historic battle, the balaclava, a garment that later shrouded in secrecy the heroes of the resistance, and so many movements that fought and continue fighting against the abuse of power, but it also camouflages the identity of bank robbers or rapists, also wrestling attire, has ended up playing a function so little epic as that of sunscreen on the crowded Chinese beaches. The paintings of María Carbonell lead us […]
Continents too narrow for their content: bodies trapped in glass boxes, feline fierceness fading in black cages … The bars jail, like the panthers, were no more than shadows of a deep dream of Paloma Navares, shadows that throughout her life has been veiling appearances, so she has been forced to grope what is not apparent. The idea of confinement that upholds her artistic work is probably a reflection of the fear of being trapped […]
