ana laura alaez - trayectoria - le bastart

Ana Laura Aláez, my body, my sanctuary

It is so respectable to wake up and worry about “what I should wear” as reflecting on whether a sculpture has the proper shape, material and scale. I dare say that sometimes it’s the same exercise. This statement, which I rescued from a lecture given by Ana Laura Aláez in Arteleku, gives us the key to understanding the start of her career as artist and her evolution. For her, self-expression (first in the dressing room) […]

zhang huan ma liuming - le bastart

Look, if I loved you it was because of you hair

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), […]

cabello carceller lost in transition cristal red - le bastart

Cabello/Carceller, liminal territories

In the rites of passage the individual is separated from the community and then regrouped assuming a new status. At the threshold between these two phases, human being becomes transitional, remains in suspense, without social reality, and this invisibility allows him to move on the margins of the consensual structure. The “liminal person” is a creative power, liberated from all taboo. Within the ritual it is represented with asexual or bisexual attributes. The anthropologist Victor […]

fernando bayona detention cell building buchenwald - le bastart

Fernando Bayona; to each his own

If a work is too legible it is not art, it is propaganda, Andrés Serrano argued in relation to the visual reflection of his ambiguous religious feeling, blasphemous for some and beautiful for others, because it is this breadth of readability that bothers, especially when one appeals to the purity of the impure or, rather, when the latter term is emptied of all meaning. Fernando Bayona also observes the world through the flesh, while his […]