The mind of Paula Rego works as an alchemical still. She has the hability to absorb, distill and transmute essences of life and fable in which her literary readings reactivate hidden “reefs” of the subconscious. She composes visual stories in which remnants of personal and collective history, dream and memory, intertwine in each other, forming dense plots that trap us, not so much by the narration itself as by the way of joining together. Halfway […]
Entertainment in its most advanced state is no longer supported by evasion but rather by the exploitation of extreme emotions. Bruce Bégout speculated about it in his novel Le Park, about an island transformed into a resort not suitable for mass tourism, in which visitors could satisfy their most perverse desires. Dungeons in casinos basements, dangerous jungles and neurobiological architecture contributed to fill their morbid thirst for spectacle. The nouveau riche who participate in the […]
Winckelmann revolutionized the historiography of ancient art by turning to the mystique of erotic contemplation. The artists’ school was in the gyms, he writes as he imagines Fidias going to the stadium to study the harmonious proportions of the athletes, their muscles in tension, the choreographic beauty of the struggles in the arena… Also, he figured Socrates in the arena recruiting young ephebos to whom to instruct in the art of the temperance. The contemplation […]
Lee Lozano was an artist who didn’t want to be one more piece in the gear of art, who by her blood and guts came to choose what type of buyer were suitable to acquire her work; who decided where, how and when to exhibit; who fixed the moment of get to the top of her career and the term to finish it. Stubborn and irreverent, in 1970 managed to show in the most prestigious […]
Hygiene is the religion of fascism, Paul McCarthy told to his interlocutor in an interview in which he spoke of his intention to transform Hummel porcelain figurines into grotesque characters with phallic noses. His desire to unveil the obscene side of the idyllic pastoral life represented by these kitsch statuettes, to desecrate his cloying neatness, extends to all his artistic production, dedicated to turning the patriarchal morality around. And against social hygiene McCarthy proposes the […]
Roberta Marrero was born and grew up on an island, Gran Canaria, inserted in a culture, the Spanish, which in the beginning of the seventies was also insular, obscurantist and pious. At least, she remembers it thus. But that girl’s mind tore down all that fence, and with a genuinely postmodern spirit she began to record in her imaginary archive a peculiar iconographic blurring between stigmata and pop idol, between holy cards or sacred hearts […]
The sexual night of each corresponds to that first scene that we can’t know but to which we owe our existence, and whose secret we will not cease to search unconsciously. Hence behind every image we always look for an underlying image, says Pascal Quignard, who has made of this search the leitmotif of his essayistic journey, traces the cultural nuptials between sex and fear, between the Dream and the Rapture (in love, in death), […]
The transition from a gray reality to a fantasy realm, from a windowless room to an infinite and lysergic nature, from cultural oppression to instinctive liberation, is a common denominator of children’s tales like The Wizard of Oz or Winnie the Pooh where the child transforms his o her relatives (or stuffed animals) into extreme beings subject to the whims of sleep. It is not surprising that Henry Darger was fascinated by the tornadoes, thresholds […]
