Categoría: Reviews

paul mccarthy - tied woman - le bastart

Paul McCarthy, the legacy of the Old West

Hygiene is the religion of fascism, Paul McCarthy told to his interlocutor in an interview in which he spoke of his intention to transform Hummel porcelain figurines into grotesque characters with phallic noses. His desire to unveil the obscene side of the idyllic pastoral life represented by these kitsch statuettes, to desecrate his cloying neatness, extends to all his artistic production, dedicated to turning the patriarchal morality around. And against social hygiene McCarthy proposes the […]

mateo mate - discobolo negro - le bastart

Mateo Maté, decanonizing the canon

Give back to the art what the power took from him could be one of the mottos that guide the projects of Mateo Maté. But since «great art» has along the history been venal, easily bribed, an instrument of propaganda…, its restitutions can not but be ironic. Just as the concept of «camouflage» had served the artist to establish correspondences between the Impressionist landscape and the mimetic tactics of military power, he now takes the […]

anne imhof - faust - le bastart

Anne Imhof, death alive in Venice

Rage, Angst, Deal … and now Faust: in the titles of Anne Imhof projects converge feelings associated with anxiety and juvenile nonconformity with the transactional component of any social contract or illicit agreement. Imhof has transformed the German pavilion of the Venice Biennale into delusive glass cages, before which it is difficult to know if those who are captive are the performers or the spectators. Transparency acts in the opposite direction to the fog in […]

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 […]

henry scott tuke - under the western sun - le bastart

Being queer before queer

As a student at the Royal College of Art in London, David Hockney had already developed an idealized image of America as a mecca for sexual freedom, an image forged between Walt Whitman’s verses and his fascination with Californian beefcake magazines, whose photographs of athletic ephebes inspired the poses of his own models. At that time his formal experimentation owed more to the obscene graffiti of public toilets than to museums. The academic atmosphere was […]

oriol vilapuig - sirena - le bastart

Oriol Vilapuig, night watch

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), […]

laia arqueros - baubo - le bastart

Erotic laugh as talisman

The etymology reveals the divergences between contemporary moral parameters and those of the classical period. Pascal Quignard, in Sex and Terror, provides good examples of how the word «castites» had more to do with «integrity of caste» than with any kind of virginal purity. Likewise, virtus referred to manly vigor, to the power of the free man or “vir” against the servus. The Romans were obsessed with virile power, hence the phallus (Fascinus) was the […]