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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
In the pictorial universe of Santiago Ydáñez the snow is never virgin, the children are not innocent, the human tends to bestiality, the statue acquires carnal morbidity and the living flesh is mummified. The animal oscillates between the tenderness and the monstrous, becomes a haunting metaphor like the winter landscape, idyllic and at the same time atrocious. Inveterate collector and lover of Baroque carvings, Santiago does not hesitate to visit the assorted churches of virgins […]
Lee Lozano was an artist who didn’t want to be one more piece in the gear of art, who by her blood and guts came to choose what type of buyer were suitable to acquire her work; who decided where, how and when to exhibit; who fixed the moment of get to the top of her career and the term to finish it. Stubborn and irreverent, in 1970 managed to show in the most prestigious […]
Hygiene is the religion of fascism, Paul McCarthy told to his interlocutor in an interview in which he spoke of his intention to transform Hummel porcelain figurines into grotesque characters with phallic noses. His desire to unveil the obscene side of the idyllic pastoral life represented by these kitsch statuettes, to desecrate his cloying neatness, extends to all his artistic production, dedicated to turning the patriarchal morality around. And against social hygiene McCarthy proposes the […]
Rage, Angst, Deal … and now Faust: in the titles of Anne Imhof projects converge feelings associated with anxiety and juvenile nonconformity with the transactional component of any social contract or illicit agreement. Imhof has transformed the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale into delusive glass cages, before which it is difficult to know if those who are captive are the performers or the spectators. Transparency acts in the opposite direction to the fog in […]
