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 […]
The reverse of consensual reality never before Joel-Peter Witkin had been shown with such diabolical perfection and such crossing of artistic genres. It was in the late Middle Ages when iconographies with cynical streak were developed to erode the status quo, being the mundus inversus (the donkeys riding the men, the rich serving the poor …) and the “macabre dance” those who mostly devastated social hierarchies and taboos. Bearing in mind that in medieval times the […]
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 […]
