She subverts official versions of reality, understands other means of inhabite the city, celebrates anniversaries of women artists missing from art books, she prefers ephemeral interventions in street than museographic embalming of experience…, we could say that Diana Larrea always has felt attracted by the other side of the moon. This is the title of an ongoing group exhibition curated by Tomás Ruiz-Rivas, and refers to the alternative history of recent artistic practices that has […]
A wooden house in a Canadian forest inhabited with maples and polar bears, isolated from the world except for the macabre news that broadcast a radio as stringing fragments of cruel tales. Howls of wolf and shots of hunters interrupt sometimes the announcer voice. A teenage boy in his pajamas, wrapped in his bed, gazes at the snowy meadows through the fogged glass of the window. He gets up at midnight, takes a piece of paper and […]
Man has always seen in other kingdoms, animal and plant ones, ideal that in his own are difficult to find in its pure state: the nobility of the dog, the beauty and freshness of the flower as love symbol… But if we pause at the latter and defoliat it without compassion, soon is revealed the illusion of these utopian images. Unlike the leaves, that age with dignity, according to Georges Bataille, flowers wither like old and snobbish overly made-up widows, […]
Drawing lines in space, threading stories, making webs … the act of weaving has the quality of being able to include other arts, from drawing to architecture, through writing and music. One of the recurring images of the spinner in mythology is that of weaver of destiny: both the Greek Moiras and their Norse correlates. But the warp that we will trace in this writing defies this idea of predetermined destiny, because our plot will […]
Looking at Teresa Margolles work as a whole, we observe that it underlies in it an inherent processual logic, which, interlinking from project to project becomes stronger, and it goes against the systemic logic of capitalism in its gore side (as the also Mexican Sayak Valencia rightly called it). Thus, against the trivialisation of crime she claims grieving for each body, facing the anonymity and reification of the victims she opposes their individuation, in front […]
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 […]
David Trullo travels to the past again and again. It has done so by collecting visual flashes that somehow contributed to forge his personality (Timewarp), reconstructing episodes mutilated by the heteronormative speech (A true history) … Now, in his two current expositions reviews the queer iconography confronting with pieces of the National Museum of Decorative Arts (Queer cabinet) and tracing a personal homoerotic genealogy impregnated with lyricism and irony in equal parts (Souvenirs). The truth […]
