If we consider head hair as a psychic displacement of pubic hair (see Charles Berg’s The Unconscious Meaning of Hair), a broad panoply of sexual references is displayed according to the type of cut, tonsure, length, curl, color … leading to simplistic equations as shaved=celibacy or castration; long and red-haired=hot pussy. The history of art follows these symbolic displacements by immortalizing them in icons, such as the perfidious Lilith combing her red hair (Rossetti’s oil), […]
Since Hannah Arendt regarded love as the essence of the revolutionary spirit, since the counterculture of the sixties claimed it as a subversive force, this original impulse of the human condition has had to abandon the old-fashioned romanticism that reduces it to a flat, narcotizing emotion. The title of the exhibition Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love? in the Moscow Museum of Modern Art is taken from the homonymous action that the artist Sharon […]
A man tells that when he lost his penis a witch came to ask him to return. She told him to climb into the tree and take the one he likes best in the nest where they kept the male organs. And when he wanted to take the biggest she said: you should not take that because it belongs to a parish priest. This extract don’t come from any milesian fable or racy tale but […]
Historians generally place the beginnings of art in the search of mimesis, the copy of the same, that Pliny the Elder exemplified by the story of a girl drawing the silhouette of her lover on the wall to retain his image. But the cave painting reveals that primitive man and woman barely-represented themselves, and when they did it was in merger with other animals (therians) or in a extremely fragmentary form. So, as Bataille observed, […]
Since the discovery of the technique of wet-drapey in Classical Greece to the arty side of the advertising photo, from Phidias to Erwin Blumenfeld, to veil carnal pleasures has been the best way to enhance them. Now that everything is so overexposed the veil is a precious asset, a relic of more surprising times, such as those that encouraged the encrypted porn, with gray weaving as curtains in front of coupled bodies. These filters, with […]
From the heat of joie de vivre to the silence of solitary ecstasy, from histrionic posing of girls tipsy by the party and challenged by the camera to the joyful implosions catched under leather and latex. It is a path of purification, artistic and emotional, in that capture the fleeting happiness, which has followed Juan Francisco Casas. That path, passing through Rome, was covered with (pleasant) thorns. He rediscovered the intricacies of amorous passion following […]
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 […]
In an interview, the artist Makoto Aida justifies Japanese obsession with teenagers by what he calls feminization of the country, who lost his father after abolition of the army at the end of World War II. Aida’s work caricatures sexual philias of his countrymen, attacks the vernacular masochism rooted in ancient codes of honor, entrepreneurial fever and dreamy ways to escape. Since the floating time of ukiyo-e to the weightless walks between manga girls of […]
