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 […]

David wojnarowicz - untitled - le bastart

Peter Hujar and David Wojnarowicz. There is no time…

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 […]

cosey fanni tutti - scarlet - le bastart

Cosey Fanni Tutti and other scarlet girls

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 […]

yann leto - boxeo - le bastart

Yann Leto, sur un coup de tête

A bottle of Jack Daniels, a box of antidepressants showing its empty blister packs, rolling papers and cigarettes, all on the table as a kind of first aid kit, becomes a self-portrait of Yann Leto in the doldrums. This painting, Knock out, despite occupying a modest place in his current exhibit, The Round, gives some emotional intimacy to a set of works in which the quadrilateral is the leitmotiv of a confrontation between two bodies […]

enrique marty - failure - le bastart

Enrique Marty, when our everyday life is cracking up

Failed sculptures, false monuments, fallen idols, fanatics and misfits, big feet and delirious brains. Enrique Marty expresses over and over again the “sense of failure” (Sense of failure was the title of one of his latest shows), the absurdity and the misunderstanding that, far from jamming the gears of the world, lubricates them. But not all is lost. If there is one thing the Salamancan artist believes in, it is catharsis — that fear and […]

miguel scheroff - ritual - le bastart

Miguel Scheroff, the twilight of all species

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 […]

martinez canovas - nido - le bastart

Martínez Canovas. Highbrow? Lowbrow? What the hell!

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 […]