carlos motta - corpo fechado - le bastart

Carlos Motta, drilling peepholes in the official history

“The body is a repository of marks”, we are told at one point in one of Carlos Motta‘s visual essays, Lágrimas (2017). Many of the works of this Colombian artist speak about colonial and postcolonial marks, metaphorical scars on flesh and desire, indelible despite the passing of centuries. Jacques Derrida, for whom the concept of cultural “sign” or “scar” was so important, said that it is not possible to escape the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even the death […]

avelino sala - a perfect day - le bastart

Avelino Sala, living in strange days

The best utopias are those that fail because even the best of wishes has a double burden, beneficial and harmful, of unpredictable consequences. Fredric Jameson exemplifies it with the novel by Ursula LeGuin The Lathe of Heaven, where the desire to stop overpopulation condemns the humanity to extermination. Without recourse to science fiction, history of humankind is replete with perversions of collectivist ideals and neo-fascist distortions of the sense of belonging. By pointing out the […]

nathalie rey - fukushima - le bastart

Nathalie Rey, millenium monsters and other cruel tales

The past is imprinted in the world of objects, in everything that we call “inanimate” even though if it did not have some kind of “anima” it would not encourage the memories. The work of Nathalie Rey pivots around memory, which she guts and sews on her operating table, dissecting recycled stuffed animals, her “little monsters”. Intelligence should not intervene in the archeology of memory, at least at first, in a first approach, wrote Proust, […]

hayv kahraman - musical chairs - le bastart

Hayv Kahraman, body as a container of diasporic memories

Despite the truths embedded in Theodor Adorno’s statement that it’s impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz, it’s equally true that in the face of horrors and traumas of war, lyrical beauty is often the only avenue of catharsis. When Hayv Kahraman recollects episodes from her childhood in a besieged Iraq, she recovers the human warmth that drove away fears while seeking refuge in anti-aircraft shelters. During temporary cease-fires, children left their hideouts and challenged each […]

alejandro bombin - soltero - le bastart

Alejandro Bombín, high frequency disturbances

Andy Warhol wanted to be a machine, decoupling the artistic work from the human pulse, to eliminate the brushstroke. Alejandro Bombín wants to humanize the machine, recover the gesture, a margin for error. Between one and the other the digital revolution took place, making all of us massive producers of images, fulfilling the dream of the pop art master. We live in a democratizing media utopia (or dystopia, depending on the point of view), in […]

florencia rojas - luna mapa - le bastart

Florencia Rojas, starting from a secret of her own

Apparently, knowledge draws on from darkness to light, from the unknown to the known, from the unnameable to the catalogable, but all truth unearthed buries other possible truths. All consensus hides dissent. Whether it is intended to bias uncomfortable episodes of history or to defend assumed scientific objectivity, whether for profit or propaganda purposes, power is exercised by burying old ghosts in order to invent new ones. Florencia Rojas, in contrast, exhumates forgotten ghosts, moves […]

juan francisco casas my latex andromeda - le bastart

Juan Francisco Casas, memory as a glitch

From the heat of joie de vivre to the silence of solitary ecstasy, from histrionic posing of girls tipsy by the party and challenged by the camera to the joyful implosions catched under leather and latex. It is a path of purification, artistic and emotional, in that capture the fleeting happiness, which has followed Juan Francisco Casas. That path, passing through Rome, was covered with (pleasant) thorns. He rediscovered the intricacies of amorous passion following […]