Moths, those butterflies that have a tendency to get lost, that feel a fatal attraction by light to the point of being burned to death, seem to us disturbing creatures. Their scorched wings remind us of Icarus’ suicidal impulse. On the other hand, perhaps they look to us unsettlingly familiar because we do nothing but flit around blinding electronic lights. Moths have fascinated writers and poets. The glimmer of light they leave in their wake […]
Month: March 2019
AES+F, choreographies of salvation in fine porcelain
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 […]
Hit and sunk. Eulàlia Vallodosera and Cristina Lucas
To slash Velazquez’s Mirror Venus, “spit” on Hegel, decapitate Michelangelo’s Moses or “desecrate” Emperor Claudius’s statue are gestures (some real, others symbolic) synchronized in a single iconoclastic movement against the patriarchal patrimony. The suffragette (Mary Richardson) who attacked the ideal Beauty, the writer (Carla Lozi) who spat against the Hegelian understanding of history as a dialectic struggle between masters and slaves (in which women, lacking conscience, does not reach even to be a slave), the destruction […]
Artemio. Art Fairs: high-pressure ecosystems
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 […]