pol gonzalez novell - quatrieme mur - le bastart

When paintings left their frames

“A horrible and immense hole”, exclaimed a journalist from Le Figaro seeing the desolate aspect of the Louvre wall where weeks before had hung The Mona Lisa. After the robbery, the visits to the museum increased in such a way that the newspapers satirized about it: “some people like works of art by themselves, others by the place they occupy”, said a headline. The Italian carpenter who, one summer morning in 1911, removed La Gioconda […]

ana maria maiolino - entrevidas - le bastart

The territory and its layers: gender, nature, body

At the time of the great conquests, modern cartographic science was developed. Felipe II, overwhelmed by the vastness of his territories, commissioned to the best geographer of the time to map the world. So, he could take complete control at a glance, and even maybe dreaming of being a Salvator Mundi with the orb in one hand and blessing with the other. The title of this first modern atlas, Theater of the World (Theatrum Orbis […]

avelino sala - a perfect day - le bastart

Avelino Sala, living in strange days

The best utopias are those that fail because even the best of wishes has a double burden, beneficial and harmful, of unpredictable consequences. Fredric Jameson exemplifies it with the novel by Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven, where the desire to stop overpopulation condemns the humanity to extermination. Without recourse to science fiction, history of humankind is replete with perversions of collectivist ideals and neo-fascist distortions of the sense of belonging. By pointing out the […]

francis alys - night watch - le bastart

Fable or laboratory creatures, gods or beasts

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 […]

wolf vostell - coche - le bastart

Wolf Vostell, immobile travel among migratory birds

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, […]

aes+f - feast of trimalchio - le bastart

Petit tour

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 […]

carles congost - wolf motives - le bastar

Carles Congost, audiovisual metarratives

Seeing Carles Congost video creations, a cross of film and television genres for a moment confuse us, more if several of them come together in the same exhibition space, forcing us to rewire our cognitive habits, our audiovisual imaginary, after that initial flicker our senses are sharpened. The conceptual palimpsest is not far behind the formal experiment. Thus, in Simply the best (2016), a Swiss firefighter who loves his work as much as African-American music, speaks about negro spirituals […]

paloma navares - iluminaciones - le bastart

Paloma Navares, night vision

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 […]