Contrary to the desire for possession, the caress is a voluptuous gesture that “nothing catches”, nothing retains. Emmanuel Levinas took the poetic image of the caress as a paradigm of the right distance between the self and the other, that distance that embraces alterity without annulling it. In the hand-painted porcelain statuettes by AES+F the caresses abound, but here the promise of future announced by Levinas is completely distorted, with stylized advertising choreographies With kitsch […]
The sexual night of each corresponds to that first scene that we can’t know but to which we owe our existence, and whose secret we will not cease to search unconsciously. Hence behind every image we always look for an underlying image, says Pascal Quignard, who has made of this search the leitmotif of his essayistic journey, traces the cultural nuptials between sex and fear, between the Dream and the Rapture (in love, in death), […]
May his thick beard not lead us to deceit. Anthony Stark is not a straggler hipster, rather we imagine him a kind of undisciplined disciple of Courbet. But the origin of the world of this nineteenth-century painter is the twilight of Stark’s own, because for him the desire is the prelude to death, his ecstatic announcement, the previous climb to the vertigo of the abyss. Because, as is underlined in his last pictorial series appropiating […]
The transition from a gray reality to a fantasy realm, from a windowless room to an infinite and lysergic nature, from cultural oppression to instinctive liberation, is a common denominator of children’s tales like The Wizard of Oz or Winnie the Pooh where the child transforms his o her relatives (or stuffed animals) into extreme beings subject to the whims of sleep. It is not surprising that Henry Darger was fascinated by the tornadoes, thresholds […]
To decryalize the sacred and to sacralize the profane, to order the chaos and disrupt the order, eroticize stigmas and stigmatize precepts, purify the impure, to prefer aporia to logic and the peripheral to the central … It is what we deduce that underlies the intentions of Susana Ibáñez. The artist had already shown in previous works her interest in the wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities (compendiums of knowledge prior to museum asepsis), in which […]
