fito conesa - waltz - le bastart

Fito Conesa, in crescendo

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 […]

jose antonio vallejo - muneco hinchable - le bastart

Jose Antonio Vallejo Serrano and his avatars looking for love

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 […]

cristina de middel - gentlemen's club - le bastart

Cristina De Middel, the reverse shot of a profession

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 […]

susana ibanez - terciopelo - le bastart

Susana Ibáñez, aporia of the hole

To decryalize the sacred and to sacralize the profane, to order the chaos and disrupt the order, eroticize stigmas and stigmatize precepts, purify the impure, to prefer aporia to logic and the peripheral to the central … It is what we deduce that underlies the intentions of Susana Ibáñez. The artist had already shown in previous works her interest in the wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities (compendiums of knowledge prior to museum asepsis), in which […]

rosana antoli - generaciones - le bastart

Rosana Antolí; play, pause, forward, reset

Everything is circular until is not is the title of Rosana Antolí‘s video, and at the same time it could summarize her vital philosophy, ergo, her artistic work. Dancing the hula hoop until it falls to the ground, trying to repeat again and again a few strokes on the paper knowing that they will never be the same, involve in that stroke the whole body transforming the canvas into a dance floor … The lucidity […]

abel azcona - agua - le bastart

Abel Azcona, empathy as an artistic subject

Intimacy is the highest degree of exposure and risk we can reach, it is pure inhospitable exteriority. Unlike the private, which we can lock in, the intimate can only be experienced in relation to others. We just feel naked and vulnerable when someone looks at us. I borrow from Jose Luis Pardo this semantic revision to better understand the work of Abel Azcona, because I recognize that when first time I met it generated mixed […]

birgit jurgenssen - nest - le bastart

When women took off the apron

It was in the seventies of the last century when the famous motto the personal is political was created , one that in the artistic field allowed the women to remove the housewives from their holes, to transfer their defiance to those figures of the domestic, denouncing with humor the psychopathologies caused by their pre-determined passage through the stages of life: from chaste bride to happy mom, from seductive pin-up to fiftyish women secluded in […]

juan carlos martinez - fraternity - le bastart

Juan Carlos Martínez, how do we look at each other?

The world has become a beehive leaky of peepholes from which to observe without being seen, virtual labyrinths traversed by stalkers. Obviating the Orwellian resonances, this world populated by spied spies can be read poetically like songs of love. In the film of Jean Genet (a chant d’amour) the peepholes practiced in the cells seem holes drilled by the uncontrollable force of desire, which slips through all the cracks, deceiving even the jailer. Masculine universes, […]