“The body is a repository of marks”, we are told at one point in one of Carlos Motta‘s visual essays, Lágrimas (2017). Many of the works of this Colombian artist speak about colonial and postcolonial marks, metaphorical scars on flesh and desire, indelible despite the passing of centuries. Jacques Derrida, for whom the concept of cultural “sign” or “scar” was so important, said that it is not possible to escape the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even the death […]
During the 19th century, panoptic architecture applied to prisons became gradually widespread in Europe, prisons in which the feeling of being watched by the eye that sees all would implant a sort of censoring chip inside each prisoner. When Barcelona hosted the Universal Exhibition, in 1888, it closed basements and dungeons and also opened its model prison. It is said that at the beginning it was known as hotel entença (the street name) because it was […]
It happened returning from school, along the road so many times traveled. He walked beneath a power-line when he saw a feather falling, and before it reached the ground Ernst had already climbed to the top, searching the nest. He was fascinated by birds. There were the pigeons, but the sudden arrival of their mother frightened him. He grabbed the cables to avoid falling and the electric shock caused him an irreparable damage. He was […]
In Ancient Greece, while the wise and not-so-wise philosophers argued in their endless symposiums, reclining among soft cushions, their wives frolicked in the field, dancing naked, ate cakes shaped like phalluses and sesame vulvas. The truth is that much of their time was spent indoors, but when they left home, they messed it up. Or so we like to imagine it. Robert Graves defined the Athenian Thesmophoria as agricultural orgies, and Laia Arqueros reinvents, again and again, […]
News symbiosis between “they and us” Animals have had a privileged place in art since prehistoric times. The figurative painting is born invoking bison and bovids in cave rites. Recent cave discoveries reveal that dog domestication might have started even before the Neolithic. In sedentary societies, religious celebrations and sacrificial rites take over from the hunting rites, while birds and quadrupeds of all kinds take their place in the divine pantheons of the great cultures. The […]
Multiple eyes are scattered in an agonic world. They remind us some representations of the divine Lamb inside Romanesque churches. Iex Cosmonauta places them under Saint Peter’s dome, and the Vatican has become a shooting range. The Evangelist Matthew has changed his pen for a rifle. Large-format drawings characterized by a bright line depict post-apocalyptic scenes, introducing us into devastated areas but that seem reluctant disappear. Everything is born again in an eternal cycle, but […]
… An interview to Pilar Bonet Perhaps because to a large extent the contemporary feeling is polarized between apocalyptic predictions and a profound disenchantment, nowadays we are especially attracted to those minds that had been touched by something sacred and that did not submit to anything that would hinder their revelations. The historiography has had to be revised, re-read the work of artists and Renaissance scholars under the dim light of their hermetic knowledge, or […]
For those who believe the aesthetic experience is an intellectual and sensitive exchange, for whom the communication between the piece of art and the viewer should be intimate and personal, the expression “cultural tourism” is almost an oxymoron. Within the “must-see” museums is reproduced on a small scale what usually happens on an urban scale: the tourist goes through the corridors as transit zones to get in front of a “required selfie” masterpiece, and once […]
