txema salvans - waiting game - le bastart

Txema Salvans, on route

8 a.m. Murcia’s beaches are now on alert for strong gusts of wind, but the sky will remain clear all weekend, while in Tarragona… Txema Salvans listens to the weather forecast while placing his stuff in the van (tripod, camera …) With his hands already on the steering wheel, he traces with marker some secondary route on a Spanish Levante map that always carries on. Or, well, let’s not be so romantic…, even if analog photography […]

aes+f - trimalchio - le bastart

AES+F, existence as perpetual limbo

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 […]

miss beige - contraluz - le bastart

Si tu me dices beige…

Miss Beige is an inveterate flaneur, wearing out her shoe (beige?) soles, wandering around bland neighborhoods, taking photos before the lowered blinds of a sex shop (Mundo fantástico), next to a parking meter (La bella y la bestia) or between ugly suburban buildings, because she knows that beauty is elsewhere. Almost as if following the advice of Walter Benjamin to experience the street creatively and escape of the clusters that moves robotic by pre-determined paths, […]

santiago ydañez - lobos - le bastart

Santiago Ydáñez, taming the monster

In the pictorial universe of Santiago Ydáñez the snow is never virgin, the children are not innocent, the human tends to bestiality, the statue acquires carnal morbidity and the living flesh is mummified. The animal oscillates between the tenderness and the monstrous, becomes a haunting metaphor like the winter landscape, idyllic and at the same time atrocious. Inveterate collector and lover of Baroque carvings, Santiago does not hesitate to visit the assorted churches of virgins […]

florencia rojas - luna mapa - le bastart

Florencia Rojas, starting from a secret of her own

Apparently, knowledge draws on from darkness to light, from the unknown to the known, from the unnameable to the catalogable, but all truth unearthed buries other possible truths. All consensus hides dissent. Whether it is intended to bias uncomfortable episodes of history or to defend assumed scientific objectivity, whether for profit or propaganda purposes, power is exercised by burying old ghosts in order to invent new ones. Florencia Rojas, in contrast, exhumates forgotten ghosts, moves […]

veronica ruth frias- last supper - le bastart

Veronica Ruth Frias, life breaking the solemnity of art

The equivalence between art and life, the will to make life a matter of art in order to question inertia and patterns of behavior was decisive in the happening of the seventies, in the actions of Fluxus, in the first wave of feminism … However, during the last third of the twentieth century, the theme of motherhood was a burden for women artists, obsessed in their struggle to escape from the domestic sphere to which […]

alejandro casanova - image thief - le bastart

Alejandro Casanova, interchangeable intimacy

Publicity and pornography have made the conversion of the subject into object (decorative or sexual) to acquire degrading connotations, but the commodification of the human body is linked to the history of art, has been its leitmotiv for centuries. If in the history of painting we review the evolution on the treatment of the naked or the intimate framing that spurs the spectator-voyeur libido, we can study how the parameters of shyness change with the […]

adrian pino - metamorfosis - le bastart

Adrián Pino Olivera, from logos to myth

Among all the living creatures only the human race is free and eccentric, to say of Pico della Mirandola, because her freedom allows her to rise to the supracelestial spheres and at the same time to descent and drown in the mud. His colleague Marsilio Ficino founded in Eros, love, the integrative principle between matter and spirit, between the intelligible and the invisible orders that live beyond the astral world. Because the longing for beauty, […]