As a nod to Genesis and its 7 days of Creation, Max Ernst summarized in «a week of kindness» his vision of human brutality. Made in the convulsive interwar period, he allegorized on the darker instincts. Its subversive power lay in the perfect blend between fragments from nineteenth-century publications of all kinds, from melodramatic novels to extracts from natural science journals. This poetic and poignant way of decompose reality seduced María María Acha-Kutscher, and it […]
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 […]
The sexual night of each corresponds to that first scene that we can’t know but to which we owe our existence, and whose secret we will not cease to search unconsciously. Hence behind every image we always look for an underlying image, says Pascal Quignard, who has made of this search the leitmotif of his essayistic journey, traces the cultural nuptials between sex and fear, between the Dream and the Rapture (in love, in death), […]
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 […]
The etymology reveals the divergences between contemporary moral parameters and those of the classical period. Pascal Quignard, in Sex and Terror, provides good examples of how the word «castites» had more to do with «integrity of caste» than with any kind of virginal purity. Likewise, virtus referred to manly vigor, to the power of the free man or “vir” against the servus. The Romans were obsessed with virile power, hence the phallus (Fascinus) was the […]
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 […]
