Art events archives at Le Bastart
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 […]
The wisdom of Homo Sapiens is questionable. The more knowledge, the less understanding. It would have been more appropriate to call the species Homo Spiritualis, said the anthropologist amazed by the rock art of the cave of Chauvet. But, as the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary reads, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. But, as it says in the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. We neither understand the propitiatory meaning of these magical symbols nor […]
Alors vous lui réapprendrez à danser à l’envers comme dans le délire des bals musette et cet envers sera son véritable endroit, Antonin Artaud It was back in the 1930’s when Antonin Artaud was in and out of asylums; in the same decade, Carol Rama went daily to visit her mother admitted to a psychiatric clinic. The encounter with sick bodies and confinement conditions inspired her first watercolors. In 1945, Rama celebrates her first exhibition […]
Continents too narrow for their content: bodies trapped in glass boxes, feline fierceness fading in black cages … The bars jail, like the panthers, were no more than shadows of a deep dream of Paloma Navares, shadows that throughout her life has been veiling appearances, so she has been forced to grope what is not apparent. The idea of confinement that upholds her artistic work is probably a reflection of the fear of being trapped […]
The uterus is a restless animal, which if not fertilized in time it moves through the woman body causing havoc wherever it goes: palpitations, seizures… It was that simple the diagnosis that doctors and philosophers such as Hippocrates and Plato attributed to what they called “hysteria”, a Greek term referring to the womb. And centuries go by… and psychoanalysis continued to relate unsatisfied female sexuality with “hysterical” disorders. Actually, the bizarre history of the uterus […]
What is the distance between a Swede sculptural beauty soaking in the Fontana di Trevi and an Italian brunette eating spaghetti, in a histrionic style, before the Fontaine Saint Michel in Paris? The latter, in a cannibal act, “devours” the misogynous construction that the first epitomize. It was one of the urban performances that the Neapolitan artist Romina de Novellis made when settling in the French capital (Splash! La Dolce Vita a Parigi 2010). Continuing […]
The island’s geography has been chosen by writers and utopians as the ideal place for the development of horizontal communities, without rich or poor, without envy or competitiveness, such as Aldous Huxley’s Pala. But the history tells us otherwise, locating in the most beautiful islands bloody chronicles of colonial despotism, cultural extermination and natural exploitation, to end up as a cover photo in a tourist brochure. The Dominican Raquel Paiewonsky belongs to a generation of […]
In l’heure bleue, nocturnal animals have already gone to sleep and diurnal ones have not yet awoken. The entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre talked about this magical hour as a privileged moment to observe quiet nature, before the parade of armored beetles and other hardened insects on which he fantasized as if they were exotic ethnic groups. During the twilight hour the forms blur, nothing remains, shadows become longer. The thought flows and looks inside. It is […]
