kerstin bratsch - talismanic - le bastart

Painting still throws down the gauntlet… Caixaforum Barcelona

The chronicle of a death so often announced, that of painting, is nothing more than the narrative of a progressive liberating itself from layers and layers of dogma and ideology. With the first avantgarde movements was exempted from the obligation to represent the outside world but entrusted with the search for the Absolute or the search of a lost “ego”. With minimalism, they wanted to deprive painting of spirit so that it was only matter […]

maria ruido - mater amatisima - le bastart

María Ruido, dismantling myths with the audiovisual montage

The absence of the paternal and maternal figures, or more specifically their physical distance as a child, and the consequent virtual relationship when the technological virtuality did not yet exist has marked, in a sense, the work of María Ruido. In her film essays, however, we could almost say that the feminist motto “the personal is political” is reversed because intimate only appears in her work in an indirect manner, through complex webs that weave the social with the […]

josep tornero - falena - le bastart

Josep Tornero, moths at night

Moths, those butterflies that have a tendency to get lost, that feel a fatal attraction by light to the point of being burned to death, seem to us disturbing creatures. Their scorched wings remind us of Icarus’ suicidal impulse. On the other hand, perhaps they look to us unsettlingly familiar because we do nothing but flit around blinding electronic lights. Moths have fascinated writers and poets. The glimmer of light they leave in their wake […]

aes+f - mediterraneum - le bastart

AES+F, choreographies of salvation in fine porcelain

Contrary to the desire for possession, the caress is a voluptuous gesture that “nothing catches”, nothing retains. Emmanuel Levinas took the poetic image of the caress as a paradigm of the right distance between the self and the other, that distance that embraces alterity without annulling it. In the hand-painted porcelain statuettes by AES+F the caresses abound, but here the promise of future announced by Levinas is completely distorted, with stylized advertising choreographies With kitsch […]

eulalia valldosera - dependencia mutua - le bastart

Hit and sunk. Eulàlia Vallodosera and Cristina Lucas

To slash Velazquez’s Mirror Venus, “spit” on Hegel, decapitate Michelangelo’s Moses or “desecrate” Emperor Claudius’s statue are gestures (some real, others symbolic) synchronized in a single iconoclastic movement against the patriarchal patrimony. The suffragette (Mary Richardson) who attacked the ideal Beauty, the writer (Carla Lozi) who spat against the Hegelian understanding of history as a dialectic struggle between masters and slaves (in which women, lacking conscience, does not reach even to be a slave), the destruction […]

artemio - machete art fair - le bastart

Artemio. Art Fairs: high-pressure ecosystems

Fair, it is said circus, amusement park, showbiz world, a carousel of banalities, bazaar of the objet trouvé and a thousand times retrouvé. In contemporary art fairs the ultimate meaningless of art is summarized: to boost the ego, and not exactly that of the artist. The Contemporary Art Apart Fair (CAAF/CDMX 2019) is not Art Basel of Basel, nor of Miami Beach, nor Frieze nor ARCO …, but all of them at the same time. It is […]

ana esteve reig - pantalla magica - le bastart

Ana Esteve Reig, a walk between the dust of the starts

We fly over the coast of Alicante accompanied by sacred music suitable for the exultant light of midday. The bird’s-eye view provides us with a large field of vision of orthogonal forms and perfect symmetries when leaving the sea and the wild landscape behind. From this aerial perspective, the rotundity of the lonely architecture refers us to an archaeological site of uncertain dating, with its bleachers, pillars, amphitheaters and pits. But it’s just a false […]

eugenio merino - paraiso - le bastart

Eugenio Merino thinks, therefore he disturbs

“If you raid the patriots’ wallets in their pockets it turns out they are Swiss,” says a vignette from El Roto, whose brief sentences and visual satire probably influenced Eugenio Merino‘s work more than any artist trained in the academy. Although the aesthetics of Merino, especially in his hyperrealist sculptures and kitsch metaphors, is peppered with by a more corrosive black humor, where heads can roll, where dictators are frozen and presidents undergo face washing […]