≋ 𝕥𝕚𝕒𝕘𝕠 𝕕𝕖 𝕒𝕓𝕣𝕖𝕦 𝕡𝕚𝕟𝕥𝕠 ≋

Fable (c. 1580) by El Greco, displayed in Room 008B at Museo del Prado The boy blowing a fire is an old theme. I was thinking about how this work was interpreted. This painting may be a pictorial interpretation of a work by the ancient artist Antiphilus, mentioned by Pliny, in which he praises a painting of a boy blowing on a fire and the reflection that the fire casts upon the room and upon the boy’s face. More than the brightness of the flame in the image itself, I was thinking about the breath, the combustion, the instability of this image’s meaning. On how its meaning is suspended by the way the action is presented. An image where impulses, desires, and heterogeneous temporalities survive. It never settles into a clear moral. What I see is visual unease. Of the onset of visual heat? Of sexual desire? #ElGreco

Parthenon. North frieze. Block 6. N VI, 16-19 (Acr. 864) On block VI four hydriaphoroi carry big hydriai filled with water for sprinkling on the sacrificial animals and the Great Altar outside of the Temple of Athena Polias. The first three water-bearers, dressed in a himation, walk one behind the other whereas the rearmost is preparing to pick up his hydria, which he has temporarily rested on the ground, perhaps to take some rest. This subtle deviation introduces a note of dissonance into the procession, a calculated break in the repetitive order that recalls Lefebvre’s reflections on rhythm and arrhythmia.

Remorse. Sphinx Embedded in the Sand (1931) by Salvador Dalí. Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum, Michigan State University. I was thinking about a small, haunting Surrealist painting I once saw in Vienna: a spectral blonde woman transformed into a sphinx, her face buried sorrowfully in her hands as she sinks into an empty desert landscape. If you look closely, you can discern, within the hollow of her back, a shoe and perhaps a glass of milk. Distinctly Dalínian motifs. Are they meant to suggest the consumption of the beloved as an act of obsessive desire, a form of Surrealist cannibalism? #Dali

Watt by Samuel Beckett. Cover design by Diego Lara. Cover illustration: Interior, Sunlight on the Floor (1906) by Vilhelm Hammershøi. Tate collection. Beckett said he wrote Watt while hiding out in Roussillon during the war, partly as a way to stay mentally afloat. The novel became less a literary project than a kind of refuge, something to immerse himself in while waiting for the occupation, and the war itself, to finally pass. What comes to my mind is the way both Beckett and Hammershøi create this sense of existential emptiness, turning silence into meditations on solitude, stillness, and the slow passing of time. A note on Interior, Sunlight on the Floor: “Described by Michaëlis and Bramsen as follows: ‘To the left is a table with a white tablecloth, which is cut by the edge of the frame, and further, a woman in black standing between the table and the wall at the back. The owner [Leonard Borwick] has folded the canvas back so that the figure is unseen, as it did not seem to him to equalize with the other parts of the picture’. This was evidently done early on, as the reproduction in The Studio in 1909 shows the picture in its present state. The concealed parts are still there, but have suffered considerable paint losses. The picture as it is today is rather similar to a painting of 1900 (Michaëlis-Bramsen No.283) known as ‘Dust in a Shaft of Sunlight’, which appears to show the same room and the same window, but with a different effect of light and shade. The room is apparently one in Hammershøi’s house at Strandgade 30, Copenhagen.” #VilhelmHammershoi #Hammershoi #SamuelBeckett #Beckett #DiegoLara

Princesa de Aida Valdés en ATM @aida_mola @atmgaleria

Texto sobre la exposición La muerte es un hotel de 5 estrellas de Aldo Urbano en Bombon Crisis Madrid, publicado en El Cultural. @aldourbano @bombonprojects @el_cultural @mariamarcocovelo photos by @roberto_ruiz_fotografo_de_arte

Entanglements by Yuko Mohri at Fundación Botín Exhibition organised by Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan) and Fundación Botín Pirelli HangarBicocca curators: Fiammetta Griccioli and Vicente Todolí. Centro Botín curator: Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz. @mo_hrizm @fundacionbotin @pirelli_hangarbicocca @Fiammetta.Griccioli @barbararmunoz

The Wasteland, 1986, bronce, steel and linoleum, by Juan Muñoz, at Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía “For the floor, Muñoz took inspiration from the image of a 2nd century mosaic from Antioch that appears in Gombrich’s book The Legacy of Apelles. The spatial anxiety is inspired by dramatic resources from a Renaissance perspective (…). Next to an image of this piece in his workbook, the artist wrote: draw the skin of a moving tiger. (…) The puppet waits for someone to make it speak, but its bronze consistency prevents it from doing so, turning it into a funeral monument to the decline of representation.” “How can we explain a maybe with a perhaps?” @museoreinasofia @manuel.segade #JuanMuñoz

I don’t want to be D, 2022, carpet with inset pile featuring a detail from Dialogue IX (1967), by Dorothy Iannone, in exhibition curated by Tania Pardo at CA2M @ca2mmadrid @tania_pardo_ @airdeparis #DorothyIannone

Texto sobre la exposición de Helen Levitt en Fundación Mapfre, publicado en El Cultural. @arteyculturafm @el_cultural @mariamarcocovelo #HelenLevitt

El Cielo y La tierra curated by Antonio Ballester Moreno at CA2M a dialogue between the work of Antonio Ballester Moreno, created in collaboration with families and students from the Federico García Lorca primary school in Móstoles, and 29 works by other artists from the collection of the Museo CA2M @antonioballestermoreno @ca2mmadrid

Alberto Greco at @museoreinasofia curated by Fernando Davis #AlbertoGreco