And now… time for pirouettes

Women. Society. Fragmentated. Body parts more important than them as women. Sexuality. Is it okay to show or not to show? Are Miley Cyrus, Rihannna provocative clothes and performances okay? Is she really harming young girls self esteem as they see in her a role model? Too much, too fast, hyper-sexualisation in our current society? These series of photographs posses these kind of questions to me.

Another day… another wrinkle, stronger foundations, beautiful people.

I am the carnival, the flame of a wild fire, that turns my life inside out, up and down.

I see you, I hear you and I wonder, how can’t you not see the beauty in words, in objects, in hands moving… and I feel like lucky because I seem to want to represent and acknowledge gestures, sounds, beauty, essences, emotions, music, all, all, all…

I ask myself what do you do to stay free within yourself? Which is your carnival?

And I say, my carnival is my art.

Yesterday I went to London to see some shows. Matisse at Tate Modern, Marvin Gaye Chetwyind at Sadie Coles HQ, Pangea: New art from Africa and Latin America at Saatchi Gallery and Dieter Roth, Arnulf Rainer – Collaborations at Hauser & Wirth.

I haven’t got much time to write in depth so I’m going to be quick on this… ( I SHOULD BE DOING MY DISSERTATION DRAFT!!! DUE THIS TUESDAY!)

I didn’t like (much) Marvin Gaye Chetwynd show. I also needed a wee desperately so I kind of wondered around Sadie Coles doing some funny-crossing-my- legs-dance whilst at the same time trying to analyse the show. Black and white prints all over the place in different sizes on the first floor with a kind of booth/bus/cave thing for drawing, maybe for children? with some catalogues on top of it in the middle of the room. The whole show felt claustrophobic and I didn’t know how I was meant to feel. Marvin succesfully changed the whole feeling of the gallery, there wasn’t anymore a white pristine gallery in there but some messy kind of room or artist studio wallpapered with some crazy imagery and text. This room combine references to Medieval churches and Baroque ornamentation with the absurdist jolts and bodily anagrams of Surrealist collage. I enjoyed the Bat Opera paintings, crazy little paintings with “bats” in some paintings flyng accross different landscapes or spreading wings… I found them quite fascinating and quite different. The fact she has chosen bats as a subjet creates something already dark and mysterious in there. Overall I like Chetwyin, I really do, her performances, her handmade work, her spontaneity and arte povera influences tick the box to me, but this show… mmmm I wasn’t too impressed.

Matisse, oh Henri Matisse. It was worth to wait 4 hours to see your work. You mastered colours like no one, so much cut outs, all different and at the same time identical. The exotic feel to these works, your Haiti visit inspirations, the vibrancy and the energy of your work is really empowering. Your boldness in the use of intense, unmodulated colour it feels just right to me. Your work feels to me like a carnival, like Summer, like the sun shinning, like exotic islands, like tropical flora and fauna. I could live in your compositions FOREVER. My work is influenced by painters like you, fauvist and expressionist artists. Thank you for having been there for future artists generations.

Dieter Roth, Arnulf Rainer – Collaborations at Hauser & Wirth was good enough and worth the visit. Quite a lot of chaotic scribbles framed around the gallery, a creative fight or challenge set by these two artists working together is these drawings. I can feel a lot of fustration, rage and specially raw energy in the works. A necessity to express wildly. An envy for life I think. Like in the work of Matisse, a mad repetition of forms and colours mirroring the cycles of life and a passion for living life like if tomorrow didn’t exist. The passionate artist, absorbing life, re-calculating and re-evaluating, and just feeling it and making art about it, because without art, life doesn’t make SENSE and this is reflected in those works. Only on my personal view of course.

Pangea: New art from Africa and Latin America at Saatchi Gallery= Overall okay, two pieces made an impact on me. Rafael Gómezbarros’s, Casa Tomada, amazing is his work, really cool, never seen anything like it. So simple and striking really. A piece of work that you have to experience in situ. I wish I could see this work from a child’s eye, that must be even more crazy. Massive ants everywhere occupying a room. It felt like a film set for a horror movie, but you realise that they are not real, of course they are not, however my imagination had a go and played with this work. I specially liked the amazed expression on people’s eyes entering the room, and emotions such as doubtfulness, wareness, scepticism, disgust and wonder. The other work is by Ibrahim Mahama, Untitled, 2013 a draped jute sacks wall installation. Very theatrical with a lot of heavy connotations with decay, death, hard labour, war, ageing. It was majestical. I wish I could have spend more time in that room.

I should now end this here and start with my draft. The clock is now looking at me worriying… I should now do my homework.

:/

It’s difficult to talk about previous work. It’s been a while and although I want to make new work I feel like I need to revise everything and post it here so I can see the journey from the beginning til my degree show. I’m crazy I don’t know what I’m doing?? Got to do my draft still for Tuesday, I have spent all week in front of the computer, the bed behind is covered with books, have been from ebay, to Gumtree, to Facebook, to reading books that don’t necesarily have nothing to do with my dissertation subject but all so interesting! I’m easy distracted. I have managed, however, to apply for the Future Generation Art Prize this week, but one of the descriptions for the work was just BAD. I had three glasses of red wine in despair and by the time I had to fill up the 3rd work, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I had the chance to send 7 works but I just couldn’t face writing about them all. It’s a shame because it would have been nice to give them a bigger portfolio but the three works will have to do. I need to keep applying for things, I can’t stop, it is all about being constant.

The ceramic dolls series are experiments with an approach to collage? or just anothe experiment to see where they will lead me. I bought around twenty ceramic dolls from a charity shop, they were all different, each one dressed up with different folk costumes from all over the world. Some of the costumes are beautiful, with so much detail. Ceramic dolls look very evil to me, there is an association with creepiness and they created an uncanny effect on me. Not sure why, but those are not too bad I must say.

Playing with tights and stuffing them with the dolls, resembling like sausages to me. One after the other, rigid, trapped in the net like stuffed and squashed meat. Is it me reflecting on how media these days try to impose on us with an ideal of beauty for us to follow? Do we all look the same? A factory of style, a factory of beauty and correctness…

(Save by the bell, school run, phew)

“There is no greater sorrow
Than to recall a happy time
When miserable.”
― Dante Alighieri

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”
― Marcel Proust

“We are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
― Carson McCullers

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly any more because the love of flight was gone and he could only remember when it had been effortless.”
― Ernest Hemingway

“I don’t have a photograph, but you can have my footprints. They’re upstairs in my socks.”

“I’d trade all my tomorrows for one single yesterday.”
― Kris Kristofferson

“Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.”
― Ann Druyan

“When people talk about the good old days, I say to people, ‘It’s not the days that are old, it’s you that’s old.’ I hate the good old days. What is important is that today is good.”
― Karl Lagerfeld

― Groucho Marx