The lament for the fleetingness of life is rarely expressed in the art before the Baroque, when the Vanitas genre reaches its maximum expression. Perhaps this could be related to the beginning of the human rebellion against death: neither the resignation to the collective destiny of the Middle Ages nor the Renaissance rationalism in whose limpid Euclidean spaces there was no place for the shadows. Miguel Scheroff, interested in the clair-obscure of human existence, in […]
Superstition, ignorance, hypocrisy, gluttony … there was no vice or stupidity that was not mocked in sayings and proverbs, in turn, translated into the visual arts by Flemish painters of the Renaissance. In the villages painted by Pieter Brueghel The Elder sanity would be a misunderstood exoticism while Hieronymus Bosch (devout and imaginative in equal parts) fused the popular saying “the world is a hay-cart” with Isaiah’s warning: “all flesh is grass”. Martínez Cánovas also […]
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, […]
The wisdom of Homo Sapiens is questionable. The more knowledge, the less understanding. It would have been more appropriate to call the species Homo Spiritualis, said the anthropologist amazed by the rock art of the cave of Chauvet. But, as the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary reads, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. But, as it says in the title of Werner Herzog’s documentary, those ancestral dreams were forgotten. We neither understand the propitiatory meaning of these magical symbols nor […]
What took its name from a historic battle, the balaclava, a garment that later shrouded in secrecy the heroes of the resistance, and so many movements that fought and continue fighting against the abuse of power, but it also camouflages the identity of bank robbers or rapists, also wrestling attire, has ended up playing a function so little epic as that of sunscreen on the crowded Chinese beaches. The paintings of María Carbonell lead us […]
What is the distance between a Swede sculptural beauty soaking in the Fontana di Trevi and an Italian brunette eating spaghetti, in a histrionic style, before the Fontaine Saint Michel in Paris? The latter, in a cannibal act, “devours” the misogynous construction that the first epitomize. It was one of the urban performances that the Neapolitan artist Romina de Novellis made when settling in the French capital (Splash! La Dolce Vita a Parigi 2010). Continuing […]
Whether we are more or less moviegoers, the filmic imprint has been storing in our subconscious. Maybe if we close our eyes and grope in our psychic archive, we will find an endless list of open files where childhood obsessions and footage from films that marked our lives seem to have been emulsified in the same bobbin. Although it would be absurd to pretend that we can discern between what we really lived and what […]
Despite the truths embedded in Theodor Adorno’s statement that it’s impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, it’s equally true that in the face of horrors and traumas of war, lyrical beauty is often the only avenue of catharsis. When Hayv Kahraman recollects episodes from her childhood in a besieged Iraq, she recovers the human warmth that drove away fears while seeking refuge in anti-aircraft shelters. During temporary cease-fires, children left their hideouts and challenged each […]
