Publicity and pornography have made the conversion of the subject into object (decorative or sexual) to acquire degrading connotations, but the commodification of the human body is linked to the history of art, has been its leitmotiv for centuries. If in the history of painting we review the evolution on the treatment of the naked or the intimate framing that spurs the spectator-voyeur libido, we can study how the parameters of shyness change with the […]
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 […]
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 […]
We imagine the Carmen González Castro‘s studio full of volumes of art history scattered here and there among her paintings, each page glossed with pencil notes, underlined and studs. Because his artistic task has always been to comb the story against the grain, appropriating certain pictorial resources or certain foundational myths to rewrite them with her own pulse. Her playful and transgressive spirit leads her to dwell on the most ingenious techniques that painting has […]
The narrative obfuscate me, the words confine me, writes Fito Conesa. Music, on the other hand, offers unsuspected cadences, tones and interior intensities that can be modulated by unconventional overlaps between image and sound, between present and past, presences and absences. Conesa has given musical form or of instrumental composition to naval battles (Fantasy and fugue for Tsushima 2015), to suburban sunrises (Ouverture 2011), to the routine going up and down of an elevator (Chamber […]
The transition from a gray reality to a fantasy realm, from a windowless room to an infinite and lysergic nature, from cultural oppression to instinctive liberation, is a common denominator of children’s tales like The Wizard of Oz or Winnie the Pooh where the child transforms his o her relatives (or stuffed animals) into extreme beings subject to the whims of sleep. It is not surprising that Henry Darger was fascinated by the tornadoes, thresholds […]
Those who ask for money in exchange for sexual services are defined as «prostitutes», an illegitimate or illegal status, while those who pay for sex are rarely differentiated from the male population in general (Gail Pheterson, The prostitution prism) Virginie Despentes, in King Kong Theory, rescues this fragment of Pheterson’s book to reflect on the cultural construction of stigmatized femininity. The clients constitute a varied population (in terms of social extraction, age, motivations…), while whores […]
