She subverts official versions of reality, understands other means of inhabite the city, celebrates anniversaries of women artists missing from art books, she prefers ephemeral interventions in street than museographic embalming of experience…, we could say that Diana Larrea always has felt attracted by the other side of the moon. This is the title of an ongoing group exhibition curated by Tomás Ruiz-Rivas, and refers to the alternative history of recent artistic practices that has […]
A wooden house in a Canadian forest inhabited with maples and polar bears, isolated from the world except for the macabre news that broadcast a radio as stringing fragments of cruel tales. Howls of wolf and shots of hunters interrupt sometimes the announcer voice. A teenage boy in his pajamas, wrapped in his bed, gazes at the snowy meadows through the fogged glass of the window. He gets up at midnight, takes a piece of paper and […]
Man has always seen in other kingdoms, animal and plant ones, ideal that in his own are difficult to find in its pure state: the nobility of the dog, the beauty and freshness of the flower as love symbol… But if we pause at the latter and defoliat it without compassion, soon is revealed the illusion of these utopian images. Unlike the leaves, that age with dignity, according to Georges Bataille, flowers wither like old and snobbish overly made-up widows, […]
Collage is a playful craft capable of escape the false absolutism of things, as Max Ernst said, because juxtaposing different realities these are relativized in a poetic and subversive way. But Max Ernst couldn’t yet foresee the current invasion of informative and disinformative collages circulating daily before our eyes, which makes the nowadays artists work of scissors and glue more complicated. The social, hegemonic and patriarchal imaginary has been able to appropriate the fortuitous encounter proclaimed […]
Drawing lines in space, threading stories, making webs … the act of weaving has the quality of being able to include other arts, from drawing to architecture, through writing and music. One of the recurring images of the spinner in mythology is that of weaver of destiny: both the Greek Moiras and their Norse correlates. But the warp that we will trace in this writing defies this idea of predetermined destiny, because our plot will […]
8 a.m. Murcia’s beaches are now on alert for strong gusts of wind, but the sky will remain clear all weekend, while in Tarragona… Txema Salvans listens to the weather forecast while placing his stuff in the van (tripod, camera …) With his hands already on the steering wheel, he traces with marker some secondary route on a Spanish Levante map that always carries on. Or, well, let’s not be so romantic…, even if analog photography […]
The mind of Paula Rego works as an alchemical still. She has the hability to absorb, distill and transmute essences of life and fable in which her literary readings reactivate hidden “reefs” of the subconscious. She composes visual stories in which remnants of personal and collective history, dream and memory, intertwine in each other, forming dense plots that trap us, not so much by the narration itself as by the way of joining together. Halfway […]
Looking at Teresa Margolles work as a whole, we observe that it underlies in it an inherent processual logic, which, interlinking from project to project becomes stronger, and it goes against the systemic logic of capitalism in its gore side (as the also Mexican Sayak Valencia rightly called it). Thus, against the trivialisation of crime she claims grieving for each body, facing the anonymity and reification of the victims she opposes their individuation, in front […]
