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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Volumes have been writing on English eccentricity, films and television series have even been made. Volumes could also be compiled on British humor and its satirical tone applied to its own idiosyncrasy. Both aspects, self-criticism and extravagance, are ruling traits of Grayson Perry‘s personality. Ceramist and transvestite, he has achieved ceramics to be considered a “fine art” and has made transvestism an essential part of his expressive necessity. Going around the halls of a museum displaying glazed vases […]
Pasolini recalled from his student days an occasion when he was contemplating with friends a fireflies’ dance a night without moonlight. That experience was recorded in his conscience as a premonition of a nearby decline. Two decades later, he would confirm the “disappearance of the fireflies” in an Italy drowned in the fascism of the media, that in his opinion was more terrifying than the one established by Mussolini. Speaking metaphorically, the fireflies were for Pasolini bodies […]
The fragile boundary between art and pornography has always worried scholars, museographers and guarantors of morality, which from the mid-nineteenth century, when the category “obscenity” assumed a legal status in England, gave rise to countless proceedings, committees and reviews of the illicit. In the midst of the sexual liberation, what happened inside the courts seemed insulated in a bubble, alien to the radical changes that were affecting even the meaning of art. In the Longford […]
