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 […]
Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum (…) In one beautiful frozen images of Venus, Judith, Susanna, Juno, Lucrece, Salome and other heroines; in the other, living women in their traditional garb, with their stereotyped gestures and phrases. In both, you are in a sense under the sign og archeology; and if I have always loved whorehouses it is because they, too, participate in antiquity by their slave-market aspect, a ritual […]
They wear veils embroidered with mournful lace but are not widowed mothers, just orphaned teenagers. They copulate and dance with death, are split into necrophiliac nymphets, entering with their alter egos in a Pop Hades, as Persephones avid of extreme experiences. Delicate faces of ominous look that Crajes paint (artist duo formed by Carla Rendon and Jessica Ruiz) remind us of the Filippo Lippi madonnas, their premonitory melancholy. But the expiatory pathos is closer to […]
Loving nature is outdated, thought the aristocrat Des Esseintes, who after wasting half of his fortune in worldly pleasures invested the rest in his artificial paradise away from the Parisian triviality. Mechanical fishes, monstrous hothouse flowers, a turtle with precious stones in the golden shell, a design to match the carpet. With this character, Joris-Karl Huysmans marked the zenith and the decline of decadence. The title of the novel, À rebours, summarizes his intention to […]
Since in the eighties contributed to forge what is known as Fura language, Marcel·lí Antunez Roca has continued bluring the boundaries between spectator and performer, between scenic language and visual arts, street and classical theatre, folk art and advanced technology. In their projects coexist the use of sophisticated interactives with experiences that keep intact the umbilical cord with his origins: the family butchery, the abattoir, village festivals…, as inheritance of a worldview linked to rural […]
Pre-Columbian codices report cosmogonies full of cruelty and eroticism, magic and transformations. Early interpretations, completely biased, of these pictograms came to us from the hosts of Hispanic conquerors, scandalized by polisexual divinity and phallic worship. In Mayan and Huasteca cultures, goddesses related to sexuality as Ixchel and Tlazolteotl were hermaphrodites. The second one incited to lust and drunkenness but was the assistant of women giving birth, healing, earth and moon deity. It was often represented […]
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 […]
In De humani corporis fabrica, Andrea Vesalius dedicated seven volumes to defend the practice of dissection to a society even rooted in the medieval conception of the body as a divine creation. To penetrate the secrets of the flesh, including for medical purposes, was in some way sacrilegious. The engravings of this treatise on anatomy reveal the difficulty of this change of mind: the flayed are not pure helpless residue; They suffer and think of […]
