Fair, it is said circus, amusement park, showbiz world, a carousel of banalities, bazaar of the objet trouvé and a thousand times retrouvé. In contemporary art fairs the ultimate meaningless of art is summarized: to boost the ego, and not exactly that of the artist. The Contemporary Art Apart Fair (CAAF/CDMX 2019) is not Art Basel of Basel, nor of Miami Beach, nor Frieze nor ARCO …, but all of them at the same time. It is […]
Failed sculptures, false monuments, fallen idols, fanatics and misfits, big feet and delirious brains. Enrique Marty expresses over and over again the “sense of failure” (Sense of failure was the title of one of his latest shows), the absurdity and the misunderstanding that, far from jamming the gears of the world, lubricates them. But not all is lost. If there is one thing the Salamancan artist believes in, it is catharsis — that fear and […]
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 […]
Superstition, ignorance, hypocrisy, gluttony … there was no vice or stupidity that was not mocked in sayings and proverbs, in turn, translated into the visual arts by Flemish painters of the Renaissance. In the villages painted by Pieter Brueghel The Elder sanity would be a misunderstood exoticism while Hieronymus Bosch (devout and imaginative in equal parts) fused the popular saying “the world is a hay-cart” with Isaiah’s warning: “all flesh is grass”. Martínez Cánovas also […]
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 […]
In the pictorial universe of Santiago Ydáñez the snow is never virgin, the children are not innocent, the human tends to bestiality, the statue acquires carnal morbidity and the living flesh is mummified. The animal oscillates between the tenderness and the monstrous, becomes a haunting metaphor like the winter landscape, idyllic and at the same time atrocious. Inveterate collector and lover of Baroque carvings, Santiago does not hesitate to visit the assorted churches of virgins […]
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 […]
