René Chair already warned: If the man didn’t sometimes close his eyes tightly, he’d end up not seeing what’s worth looking at. Our sleepless eyes can no longer stop looking, plunged into a kind of horror vacui. The blindness grows in line with the overexploitation of the catastrophe. Both themes, the impossibility of seeing and the sense of bewilderment, inspire many of Carlos Aires projects while pointing to a certain stoic hedonism as the spirit of […]
When the temperatures are around 45 degrees, Extremadura is napping until sunset. Shutters remain closed, the streets empty… We have just left behind the small town of Malpartida and we already drive on a path of gravel crossed by capricious granite formations that precede what a little further will make up the curvilinear “skyline” of Los Barruecos. Erosion, a patient sculptor, has been modeling this stone universe over the centuries. When reflected in the pools, […]
Hypocrisy, a street which both begins and ends in the world, and there is scarcely anyone who doesn’t have, if not a house, then at least rooms or temporary lodgings along the length of it. A suspicious old man and a trusting young one walk to this main street of the world to observe closely habits and customs of their peers. To cross certain thresholds to see The world from inside, as Quevedo did in […]
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 […]
Failed sculptures, false monuments, fallen idols, fanatics and misfits, big feet and delirious brains. Enrique Marty expresses over and over again the “sense of failure” (Sense of failure was the title of one of his latest shows), the absurdity and the misunderstanding that, far from jamming the gears of the world, lubricates them. But not all is lost. If there is one thing the Salamancan artist believes in, it is catharsis — that fear and […]
Nico Nubiola‘s creatures are idle of necessity. The horizontal or curled up position is its natural state. The sheets adhere to their skin, seem to suffer a perpetual hangover. Sometimes we see them wandering around as lifeless bodies next to a roadside supermarket. Mass tourism is not good either for them, they end up devouring each other. Degraded substitutes of urban and leisure spaces only can locate subjects that are degraded in the same way: […]
The past is imprinted in the world of objects, in everything that we call “inanimate” even though if it did not have some kind of “anima” it would not encourage the memories. The work of Nathalie Rey pivots around memory, which she guts and sews on her operating table, dissecting recycled stuffed animals, her “little monsters”. Intelligence should not intervene in the archeology of memory, at least at first, in a first approach, wrote Proust, […]
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 […]
