francis alys - night watch - le bastart

Fable or laboratory creatures, gods or beasts

News symbiosis between “they and us” Animals have had a privileged place in art since prehistoric times. The figurative painting is born invoking bison and bovids in cave rites. Recent cave discoveries reveal that dog domestication might have started even before the Neolithic. In sedentary societies, religious celebrations and sacrificial rites take over from the hunting rites, while birds and quadrupeds of all kinds take their place in the divine pantheons of the great cultures. The […]

jake dinos chapman - great deeds against dead - le bastart

Jake & Dinos Chapman, “grande hazaña”

Walter Benjamin pointed out the paradox that poses for the humanist spirit the rejection of violence under any of its forms and at the same time its justification as a means to fight against an oppressive situation. The “divine violence” is that which is wielded promising a new liberating order, a tomorrow that will only be conquered by establishing repression, which engenders another cycle of terror for the sake of liberation, and thus the loop […]

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 […]

paula rego -shakespeare - le bastart

Paula Rego, spawns of the social monster

The mind of Paula Rego works as an alchemical still. She has the hability to absorb, distill and transmute essences of life and fable in which her literary readings reactivate hidden “reefs” of the subconscious. She composes visual stories in which remnants of personal and collective history, dream and memory, intertwine in each other, forming dense plots that trap us, not so much by the narration itself as by the way of joining together. Halfway […]