Category: Illustration

aurora duque - eos titono - le bastart

Aurora Duque, why do they call it love?

Collage is a playful craft capable of escape the false absolutism of things, as Max Ernst said, because juxtaposing different realities these are relativized in a poetic and subversive way. But Max Ernst couldn’t yet foresee the current invasion of informative and disinformative collages circulating daily before our eyes, which makes the nowadays artists work of scissors and glue more complicated. The social, hegemonic and patriarchal imaginary has been able to appropriate the fortuitous encounter proclaimed […]

lee lozano - portrait - le bastart

Lee Lozano: splices, short circuits and scapes

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 […]

Roberta Marrero, be a loser but a beautiful one

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 […]

alejandro casanova - image thief - le bastart

Alejandro Casanova, interchangeable intimacy

Publicity and pornography have made the conversion of the subject into object (decorative or sexual) to acquire degrading connotations, but the commodification of the human body is linked to the history of art, has been its leitmotiv for centuries. If in the history of painting we review the evolution on the treatment of the naked or the intimate framing that spurs the spectator-voyeur libido, we can study how the parameters of shyness change with the […]

oriol vilapuig - sirena - le bastart

Oriol Vilapuig, night watch

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), […]

laia arqueros - baubo - le bastart

Erotic laugh as talisman

The etymology reveals the divergences between contemporary moral parameters and those of the classical period. Pascal Quignard, in Sex and Terror, provides good examples of how the word “castites” had more to do with “integrity of caste” than with any kind of virginal purity. Likewise, virtus referred to manly vigor, to the power of the free man or “vir” against the servus. The Romans were obsessed with virile power, hence the phallus (Fascinus) was the […]

jum whiting - walking women - le bastart

Erotic machinery, from pistons and cylinders to nanorobots

In the Freudian compendium of oniric symbolisms, the male genitalia are represented as revolvers, knives, swords, sticks … and complex machinic devices. The machine has traditionally been associated with masculinity in its productive and destructive aspect, but the artificial creatures (literary, mythological, filmic) have been mainly women: automatons Galateas, seductive android, Pandoras clad in metal after the Industrial Revolution, replicants with artificial intelligence in the cyber era. But it is not the ideal woman forged […]

jose antonio vallejo - muneco hinchable - le bastart

Jose Antonio Vallejo Serrano and his avatars looking for love

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 […]