Category: Exhibitions

carles congost - wolf motives - le bastar

Carles Congost, audiovisual metarratives

Seeing Carles Congost video creations, a cross of film and television genres for a moment confuse us, more if several of them come together in the same exhibition space, forcing us to rewire our cognitive habits, our audiovisual imaginary, after that initial flicker our senses are sharpened. The conceptual palimpsest is not far behind the formal experiment. Thus, in Simply the best (2016), a Swiss firefighter who loves his work as much as African-American music, speaks about negro spirituals […]

David wojnarowicz - untitled - le bastart

Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. There is no time…

Pasolini recalled from his student days an occasion when he was contemplating with friends a fireflies’ dance a night without moonlight. That experience was recorded in his conscience as a premonition of a nearby decline. Two decades later, he would confirm the “disappearance of the fireflies” in an Italy drowned in the fascism of the media, that in his opinion was more terrifying than the one established by Mussolini. Speaking metaphorically,  the fireflies were for Pasolini bodies […]

cosey fanni tutti - scarlet - le bastart

Cosey Fanni Tutti and other scarlet girls

The fragile boundary between art and pornography has always worried scholars, museographers and guarantors of morality, which from the mid-nineteenth century, when the category “obscenity” assumed a legal status in England, gave rise to countless proceedings, committees and reviews of the illicit. In the midst of the sexual liberation, what happened inside the courts seemed insulated in a bubble, alien to the radical changes that were affecting even the meaning of art. In the Longford […]

yann leto - boxeo - le bastart

Yann Leto, sur un coup de tête

A bottle of Jack Daniels, a box of antidepressants showing its empty blister packs, rolling papers and cigarettes, all on the table as a kind of first aid kit, becomes a self-portrait of Yann Leto in the doldrums. This painting, Knock out, despite occupying a modest place in his current exhibit, The Round, gives some emotional intimacy to a set of works in which the quadrilateral is the leitmotiv of a confrontation between two bodies […]

martinez canovas - nido - le bastart

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 - catre - le bastart

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: […]

witkin - estudio - le bastart

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 […]