iex cosmonauta - tetramorfos - le bastart

Iex Cosmonauta, la terra trema

Multiple eyes are scattered in an agonic world. They remind us some representations of the divine Lamb inside Romanesque churches. Iex Cosmonauta places them under Saint Peter’s dome, and the Vatican has become a shooting range. The Evangelist Matthew has changed his pen for a rifle. Large-format drawings characterized by a bright line depict post-apocalyptic scenes, introducing us into devastated areas but that seem reluctant disappear. Everything is born again in an eternal cycle, but […]

carlos aires - museo cerralbo - le bastart

Carlos Aires, … don’t worry, be happy…

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 […]

marcel dzama - flowers have horns - le bastart

Marcel Dzama, make love… and war

A wooden house in a Canadian forest inhabited with maples and polar bears, isolated from the world except for the macabre news that broadcast a radio as stringing fragments of cruel tales. Howls of wolf and shots of hunters interrupt sometimes the announcer voice. A teenage boy in his pajamas, wrapped in his bed, gazes at the snowy meadows through the fogged glass of the window. He gets up at midnight, takes a piece of paper and […]

aurora duque - eos titono - le bastart

Aurora Duque, why do they call it love?

Collage is a playful craft capable of escape the false absolutism of things, as Max Ernst said, because juxtaposing different realities these are relativized in a poetic and subversive way. But Max Ernst couldn’t yet foresee the current invasion of informative and disinformative collages circulating daily before our eyes, which makes the nowadays artists work of scissors and glue more complicated. The social, hegemonic and patriarchal imaginary has been able to appropriate the fortuitous encounter proclaimed […]

Roberta Marrero, be a loser but a beautiful one

Roberta Marrero was born and grew up on an island, Gran Canaria, inserted in a culture, the Spanish, which in the beginning of the seventies was also insular, obscurantist and pious. At least, she remembers it thus. But that girl’s mind tore down all that fence, and with a genuinely postmodern spirit she began to record in her imaginary archive a peculiar iconographic blurring between stigmata and pop idol, between holy cards or sacred hearts […]

maria acha-kutscher - womankind day 178- le bastart

María María Acha-Kutscher, between document and dream

As a nod to Genesis and its 7 days of Creation, Max Ernst summarized in “a week of kindness” his vision of human brutality. Made in the convulsive interwar period, he allegorized on the darker instincts. Its subversive power lay in the perfect blend between fragments from nineteenth-century publications of all kinds, from melodramatic novels to extracts from natural science journals. This poetic and poignant way of decompose reality seduced María María Acha-Kutscher, and it […]

gino rubert narciso in Le Bastart

Gino Rubert, narciso playing dress up

Life is a game of chess lost beforehand; the important thing is to participate. Medieval painters represented death playing chess with their victims, a time when our provisional, ephemeral nature was more accepted than now. macabre dances, vanitas… were reminders not exempt from underground sarcasm. A black humor that somehow was lost with the pathos of the Baroque memento mori. Gino Rubert recovers the irony associated with our existential decay, adopting a festive-pop tone debtor […]