margaret harrison - guernica aleppo - le bastart

Margaret Harrison, humor and courage

London was a hotbed of dissent and underground activity at the end of the sixties, and when it came to surface it was like burning lava. Miss World 1970 will be remembered not so much for the award-winning beauties but for the rain of stink bombs and leaflets on the Royal Albert Hall stage, and for the banners with which young feminists expressed their rejection of that cattle market. Among the activists, there was one […]

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 […]

frances goodman - pool party - le bastart

Frances Goodman, about the uncontrollable feminine

Perhaps it is due to a lack of historical perspective, but it seems that feminism, whose stages used to be defined in waves, does not know where to surf, where it is headed. Sucked into the neoliberal maelstrom, the girl power is advertised on the catwalks of Christian Dior, and young women dive like redeemed narcissus into a digital fluidity. The media sells us that the crux of the matter is to debate whether the […]

iex cosmonauta - tetramorfos - le bastart

Iex Cosmonauta, la terra trema

Multiple eyes are scattered in an agonic world. They remind us some representations of the divine Lamb inside Romanesque churches. Iex Cosmonauta places them under Saint Peter’s dome, and the Vatican has become a shooting range. The Evangelist Matthew has changed his pen for a rifle. Large-format drawings characterized by a bright line depict post-apocalyptic scenes, introducing us into devastated areas but that seem reluctant disappear. Everything is born again in an eternal cycle, but […]

josefa tolra - dibujo - le bastart

Creativity of healers, mediums and visionary women

… An interview to Pilar Bonet Perhaps because to a large extent the contemporary feeling is polarized between apocalyptic predictions and a profound disenchantment, nowadays we are especially attracted to those minds that had been touched by something sacred and that did not submit to anything that would hinder their revelations. The historiography has had to be revised, re-read the work of artists and Renaissance scholars under the dim light of their hermetic knowledge, or […]

wolf vostell - coche - le bastart

Wolf Vostell, immobile travel among migratory birds

When the temperatures are around 45 degrees, Extremadura is napping until sunset. Shutters remain closed, the streets empty… We have just left behind the small town of Malpartida and we already drive on a path of gravel crossed by capricious granite formations that precede what a little further will make up the curvilinear “skyline” of Los Barruecos. Erosion, a patient sculptor, has been modeling this stone universe over the centuries. When reflected in the pools, […]

aes+f - feast of trimalchio - le bastart

Petit tour

For those who believe the aesthetic experience is an intellectual and sensitive exchange, for whom the communication between the piece of art and the viewer should be intimate and personal, the expression “cultural tourism” is almost an oxymoron. Within the “must-see” museums is reproduced on a small scale what usually happens on an urban scale: the tourist goes through the corridors as transit zones to get in front of a “required selfie” masterpiece, and once […]

yann leto - boxeo - le bastart

Yann Leto, sur un coup de tête

A bottle of Jack Daniels, a box of antidepressants showing its empty blister packs, rolling papers and cigarettes, all on the table as a kind of first aid kit, becomes a self-portrait of Yann Leto in the doldrums. This painting, Knock out, despite occupying a modest place in his current exhibit, The Round, gives some emotional intimacy to a set of works in which the quadrilateral is the leitmotiv of a confrontation between two bodies […]