To decryalize the sacred and to sacralize the profane, to order the chaos and disrupt the order, eroticize stigmas and stigmatize precepts, purify the impure, to prefer aporia to logic and the peripheral to the central … It is what we deduce that underlies the intentions of Susana Ibáñez. The artist had already shown in previous works her interest in the wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities (compendiums of knowledge prior to museum asepsis), in which […]
Category: Drawing
Rosana Antolí; play, pause, forward, reset
Everything is circular until is not is the title of Rosana Antolí‘s video, and at the same time it could summarize her vital philosophy, ergo, her artistic work. Dancing the hula hoop until it falls to the ground, trying to repeat again and again a few strokes on the paper knowing that they will never be the same, involve in that stroke the whole body transforming the canvas into a dance floor … The lucidity […]
Nudity, a form of dress
Nothing seems more like a whorehouse to me than a museum (…) In one beautiful frozen images of Venus, Judith, Susanna, Juno, Lucrece, Salome and other heroines; in the other, living women in their traditional garb, with their stereotyped gestures and phrases. In both, you are in a sense under the sign og archeology; and if I have always loved whorehouses it is because they, too, participate in antiquity by their slave-market aspect, a ritual […]
Patriarchy and witchcraft
A man tells that when he lost his penis a witch came to ask him to return. She told him to climb into the tree and take the one he likes best in the nest where they kept the male organs. And when he wanted to take the biggest she said: you should not take that because it belongs to a parish priest. This extract don’t come from any milesian fable or racy tale but […]
Marina Vargas, body as container
Historians generally place the beginnings of art in the search of mimesis, the copy of the same, that Pliny the Elder exemplified by the story of a girl drawing the silhouette of her lover on the wall to retain his image. But the cave painting reveals that primitive man and woman barely-represented themselves, and when they did it was in merger with other animals (therians) or in a extremely fragmentary form. So, as Bataille observed, […]
Semiotics of the veil
Since the discovery of the technique of wet-drapey in Classical Greece to the arty side of the advertising photo, from Phidias to Erwin Blumenfeld, to veil carnal pleasures has been the best way to enhance them. Now that everything is so overexposed the veil is a precious asset, a relic of more surprising times, such as those that encouraged the encrypted porn, with gray weaving as curtains in front of coupled bodies. These filters, with […]
Juan Francisco Casas, memory as a glitch
From the heat of joie de vivre to the silence of solitary ecstasy, from histrionic posing of girls tipsy by the party and challenged by the camera to the joyful implosions catched under leather and latex. It is a path of purification, artistic and emotional, in that capture the fleeting happiness, which has followed Juan Francisco Casas. That path, passing through Rome, was covered with (pleasant) thorns. He rediscovered the intricacies of amorous passion following […]
Crajes: morbid tales
They wear veils embroidered with mournful lace but are not widowed mothers, just orphaned teenagers. They copulate and dance with death, are split into necrophiliac nymphets, entering with their alter egos in a Pop Hades, as Persephones avid of extreme experiences. Delicate faces of ominous look that Crajes paint (artist duo formed by Carla Rendon and Jessica Ruiz) remind us of the Filippo Lippi madonnas, their premonitory melancholy. But the expiatory pathos is closer to […]