The shadow of laughter: when art is monstrous

They say that the devil is in the details and art is a true connoisseur of the most delicious macabre anecdote.

Although we sometimes ignore it, we actually know that horror is the best friend of ambiguous feelings.

For artists who believe in the existence of satanic cults, the holiday amounts to an open invitation to participate in an orgy of human and animal sacrifice, a kind of Super Bowl for this "gang of 666".

It is thinking in animal blood and arriving at Jordi Benito (1951-2008), one of the most radical artists in Spanish art, close to Viennese shareholders and the struggle to question the conventional in art.

Although where the sanguine runs today is through a new generation of female artists who persecute somewhat darker demons.

Somewhat wilder, too.

Tala Madani (1981) and her nightmare characters that she places in a dystopian fantasy full of blood, urine and excrement under violent voyeurism.

Also Jala Wahid (1988) and his dismembered cuts of meat, already placed on the market podium.

And how not to think of Marianna Simnett (Berlin, 1986) and her fable about cyborg cockroaches and the deformed bodies of the works of Christina Quarles (1985), Ebecho Muslimova (1984) or Dana Schutz (1976).

The horrifying is an ancient aesthetic category that is related to the grotesque factor that Bosco practiced so much and that many other artists have taken to the extreme: that impossible baroque world where opposites coexist and that truth without illusions.

What we are without wanting to.

Worlds that we create to save ourselves from the reality that artists recreate today with special emphasis.

Venice Biennale 2019,

exhibition

.

Suan Yuan (1972) and Peng Yu (1974) and their giant mechanical arm encased in a glass box trying unsuccessfully to clean a viscous liquid that simulates blood but is actually cellulose ether in colored water.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre on the Giardini.

The artists explain that this work,

(2015), expresses the duel they face in the creative sphere, mastering something that is beyond their control, although this visual provocation also touches the heels of the weaknesses of The decadence.

We speak of controversy and transgression regardless of the presence of weapons

2012) or the use of human blood - which is extracted from the participants - in

(2000) or the corpses of babies embalmed as sculptures in

( 2000).

Who knows if that macabre aesthetic joke was a metaphor for the times we live in.

Whatever it is, Valle-Inclán already knew: representation appears as an unrecognizable image in the distorting mirrors of Callejón del Gato.

Disorientation in the logical possibilities to obtain the identity of a figure through the recognition of its extreme features.

Bacon painting deformed bodies and pushing us into the vertigo of confusion.

The monstrous and the leathery.

What you don't like.

The tradition of grimacing and cross-dressing, the game of truth and lies.

The “dead” beyond a walking corpse pushes the work of Marcel Dzama (1974) into the night and its shadows.

He maintains that when he sleeps, everything that we later see in his works appears: vampire children, humanized trees, nineteenth-century soldiers, ladies in distress, and countless animals and fantastic creatures that speak of a devastatingly cruel world.

The closest thing to a contemporary Halloween party.

Dressed in sequins and feathers, his characters are resurrected as celluloid divinities, impossible robots or insatiable satyrs showing off their sexual organs.

The witch reduced to its minimum expression by Goya.

The vampire who represents transgression and the dead that return from the afterlife are conspicuous by their absence in these supernatural parlor games.

Phantasmagorical reunions that Erich Weiss, better known as Harry Houdini, would enjoy, escapist and magician highly revered in contemporary art, to whom the Fundación Telefónica paid tribute three years ago with

.

That bug that is the primitive mind that has to be fed like sourdough.

Fermentation as a new state of the contemporary.

Although the liberating sense of the monster does not end there.

From monster as terror we move to monstrosity as vindication, to hybrid creatures that foreshadow a vision of the world with less dichotomy and a less terrifying future.

A much more sophisticated taxonomy of fear, where existential terror, body politics, mental illness and almost fictional narratives coexist in a bewitching cocktail that allows demons to come out of the closet.

That laugh that opens the body freeing us towards the excess of gross pleasures.

Alex Da Corte (1980) and his aversion to studying how to find pleasure in what he does not like.

The Frankenstein myth on the floor.

Bolsonaro raising up and taking a selfie with a dwarf.

That other pandemic that are the meninas in Madrid.

Tetsumi Kudo (1935-1990) and the decomposition of humanity.

Ghosthouse

Den Frie.

Center of Contemporary Art. Copenhagen.

Until November 31.

Little bestiary of political monsters

Edition of Julia Ramírez Blanco.

Cendeac, 2020. 307 pages.

14.25 euros.