alicia burrieza marquise Louisa de la valliere

Alicia Burrieza, porno chic rococo

Engraving and eroticism interlace their paths throughout art history: from I Modi illustrated by Aretino and Renaissance engraver Marcantonio to the twilight lust of Félicien Rops, or the least publicized etchings of Rembrandt (monks rapists, hot scenes in canopy beds…) without forgetting the Shunga woodblock prints of Edo period, excellent marriage of explicit sex and refinement. Refined and explicit also aims to be Alicia Burrieza’s porno chic rococo in these boudoir scenes series of eighteenth-century […]

rurru mipanochia en le bastart

Rurru Mipanochia, sexual polymorphism

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 […]

jan sudek animals at le bastart

Teratological beauty

I am for a while the melancholy of a fragmented figure, and in that interval the mystery is revealed, Pierre Molinier The beauty of the monster began to be claimed by the romantic sensibility, when appeared aesthetic categories attending to emotional states rather than object qualities. Thus, the sublime and the grotesque will take the artistic experience to metaphysical grounds. In both concepts exist a conflict of internal forces between attraction and rejection, ecstasy and […]

Juan Francisco Casas oh roma at le bastart

Juan Francisco Casas, hard times for the mystical

Georges Bataille said that Christianity was the least religious of religions because it had banished the eroticism of inner experience. Only some mystics like St. Teresa or John of the Cross were able to access supreme ecstatic and spiritual stages of fusion. While in ancient religions was in the ritual sacrifice where eroticism and mystical experience came together, as a carnal transgression and death drive, Catholicism fell into the paradox of placing access to the […]

carolee schneemann fuses at le bastart

Private beds, public eye

Art is one of the professions that encourages greater malleability of identity while allowing get to the bottom of one or yourself more than any other. Such diverse ways in which female artists, from the 60s, have resorted to autobiography and sexual act as an artistic material, indicate the changing overlaps between art, body, intimacy and performativity before and after the arrival of reality show. We will jump from bed to bed to see different […]