marcel dzama - flowers have horns - le bastart

Marcel Dzama, make love… and war

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 […]

mapplethorpe - orchid - le bastart

Symbols of convulsive beauty

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, […]

aurora duque - eos titono - le bastart

Aurora Duque, why do they call it love?

Collage is a playful craft capable of escape the false absolutism of things, as Max Ernst said, because juxtaposing different realities these are relativized in a poetic and subversive way. But Max Ernst couldn’t yet foresee the current invasion of informative and disinformative collages circulating daily before our eyes, which makes the nowadays artists work of scissors and glue more complicated. The social, hegemonic and patriarchal imaginary has been able to appropriate the fortuitous encounter proclaimed […]

laura pineiro - botones - le bastart

Fine threading

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 […]

allan kaprow - comfort zones - le bastart

Allan Kaprow, art was like the weather

A and B on their knees slowly approaching each other, A drooling and B wiping the drool, repeating the operation until A can’t drool anymore. This was one of the acts or chapters of Comfort zones activity that Allan Kaprow presented in the mythical Vandrés gallery in a city, Madrid, living a period of suspense (1975), expectant before the impending death of Franco. CA2M (Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo) now recuperates that event managed by Fernando Vijande, which meant the […]