jan sudek animals at le bastart

Teratological beauty

I am for a while the melancholy of a fragmented figure, and in that interval the mystery is revealed, Pierre Molinier The beauty of the monster began to be claimed by the romantic sensibility, when appeared aesthetic categories attending to emotional states rather than object qualities. Thus, the sublime and the grotesque will take the artistic experience to metaphysical grounds. In both concepts exist a conflict of internal forces between attraction and rejection, ecstasy and […]

Juan Francisco Casas oh roma at le bastart

Juan Francisco Casas, hard times for the mystical

Georges Bataille said that Christianity was the least religious of religions because it had banished the eroticism of inner experience. Only some mystics like St. Teresa or John of the Cross were able to access supreme ecstatic and spiritual stages of fusion. While in ancient religions was in the ritual sacrifice where eroticism and mystical experience came together, as a carnal transgression and death drive, Catholicism fell into the paradox of placing access to the […]

carolee schneemann fuses at le bastart

Private beds, public eye

Art is one of the professions that encourages greater malleability of identity while allowing get to the bottom of one or yourself more than any other. Such diverse ways in which female artists, from the 60s, have resorted to autobiography and sexual act as an artistic material, indicate the changing overlaps between art, body, intimacy and performativity before and after the arrival of reality show. We will jump from bed to bed to see different […]

daniel tejero - dibujo - le bastart

Daniel Tejero, metonyms of not regulated desire

Graphite still lifes in which align handcuffs, clamps and bandages between water bottles and towels …, hanging ropes, leather masks … bondage articles solved with meticulous stroke. Daniel Tejero seems to adopt the role of graphic witness of a crime scene, leaving visual proof of each element to the expert report. He was there but the viewer arrived late, so he let him traces to reconstruct his own history. The curiosity of each person reopen […]

buttsucking machine - stu mead - le bastart

Terrible nymphets, with or without smartphones

First act: a patient lying on a bed hospital, immobilized between prosthesis and blankets, he is attended (better to say disregarded) by nurses with carmine lips and tight clothes, unaware of the invalid progressive hard-on (ereccion). This scene sums up the germ of Stu Mead‘s teeming imagination, who spent part of his childhood bedridden due to an illness which will hindered his adult relationship with women. Sincere in both words and pictures, he doesn’t hides […]

sergio ojeda - le bastart

Not all is sex, but almost

I don’t trust in any desexualized thought, wrote Gombrowicz in his Diaries, an author that placed on record an interior discourse in which eroticism, pornography and obscenity are only nuances of the same brain loom. The title of the exhibition curated by Javier Díaz Guardiola, Is just sex, reminds us the words of  Polish writer because it opens to multiple philosophies of life around the erotic. With connotative emphasis seems to say: sex is just […]

alex frances - beso- le bastart

Check to the macho

Maybe the first artist who broke away from the archetype of virile man was Bas Jan Ader, when in early seventies introduced in a gallery pleas and sentences of melodrama as please do not leave me; when filmed himself crying uncontrollably (I’m too sad to tell you), arranging vases of flowers or delighting in front of a sunset. Although his intention was not to undermine the segregation of roles but to parody the image of […]

Bestiality: mystical fusion o subversive tool

In pagan periods myths and legends abound, stories and oral narratives in which coitus between species, far from being stigmatized, exalted the animist communion with nature, virility of gods and heroes, transmuting power of the erotic imagination… With Christianity, the priapic nature spirits become evil beings, the bucolic image of satyr chasing nymphs is replaced in the popular imagination by the goat copulating with witches. Secular societies labeled bestiality among sexual deviations, and then exploited […]