The lament for the fleetingness of life is rarely expressed in the art before the Baroque, when the Vanitas genre reaches its maximum expression. Perhaps this could be related to the beginning of the human rebellion against death: neither the resignation to the collective destiny of the Middle Ages nor the Renaissance rationalism in whose limpid Euclidean spaces there was no place for the shadows. Miguel Scheroff, interested in the clair-obscure of human existence, in […]
Month: May 2018
Martínez Canovas. Highbrow? Lowbrow? What the hell!
Superstition, ignorance, hypocrisy, gluttony … there was no vice or stupidity that was not mocked in sayings and proverbs, in turn, translated into the visual arts by Flemish painters of the Renaissance. In the villages painted by Pieter Brueghel The Elder sanity would be a misunderstood exoticism while Hieronymus Bosch (devout and imaginative in equal parts) fused the popular saying “the world is a hay-cart” with Isaiah’s warning: “all flesh is grass”. Martínez Cánovas also […]
Nico Nubiola, staying afloat
Nico Nubiola‘s creatures are idle of necessity. The horizontal or curled up position is its natural state. The sheets adhere to their skin, seem to suffer a perpetual hangover. Sometimes we see them wandering around as lifeless bodies next to a roadside supermarket. Mass tourism is not good either for them, they end up devouring each other. Degraded substitutes of urban and leisure spaces only can locate subjects that are degraded in the same way: […]
Joel-Peter Witkin, delicious horror
The reverse of consensual reality never before Joel-Peter Witkin had been shown with such diabolical perfection and such crossing of artistic genres. It was in the late Middle Ages when iconographies with cynical streak were developed to erode the status quo, being the mundus inversus (the donkeys riding the men, the rich serving the poor …) and the “macabre dance” those who mostly devastated social hierarchies and taboos. Bearing in mind that in medieval times the […]
Nathalie Rey, millenium monsters and other cruel tales
The past is imprinted in the world of objects, in everything that we call “inanimate” even though if it did not have some kind of “anima” it would not encourage the memories. The work of Nathalie Rey pivots around memory, which she guts and sews on her operating table, dissecting recycled stuffed animals, her “little monsters”. Intelligence should not intervene in the archeology of memory, at least at first, in a first approach, wrote Proust, […]