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Last posts

Raphael again in concert in Seville

Mónica Boixeda Only-Be, Sevillian

Oh Rapahel! We almost died of boredom when we were six, seven years old listening to your records our mothers would constantly play all day long. Rapahel is such an important part of the spanish and latin culture it´s impossible to erase him. Songs such as “Maravilloso Corazón”, “Yo soy aquel”, “Como yo te amo” y “Mi gran noche” have been part of the collective Spanish culture for decades. The success of this divo lies not just in his mannerisms or his irreverence but in his great voice and unique charisma that have managed to keep him, despite of fashions and trends in the hearts of everyone Take a walk for a moment as you read this article into YouTube. Search for Raphael performances back in the 60´s and savor that bitter taste of this star which came from the time of Franco´s dictatorship, but was never related to any political movement. His style was then on the crest of the new wave of Spanish pop: his outstanding voice, completely dressed in black, (one of his trademarks ) and that dreamy face of his, leading the Spanish pop movement without causing a stir, believing blindly in romance and love, reaching out to every single adolescent in the country and beyond the borders of Spain. Then the crazier, wilder era would come, the long hair, jumping theatricality up and down on stage, almost rolling on the floor, perhaps this was his best time, a beautiful moment of an extremely high-caliber showman. In some performances his full-blooded quasi flamenco dancing merged with a less tight clothed version of Jim Morrison shocking... read more

Chris Cunningham in Barcelona

Mónica Boixeda Barcelonian, Only-Be

Chris Cunningham is nowadays one of the most acclaimed young visual artists in the world due to the terrifying aesthetics of his videos like “All is full of love” done for the Icelandic singer Bjork, in this video two robot-girls fall in love with each other and try to have sex, and “Frozen”, in which he turned Madonna into a flock of crows and shadows. He was born in 1970 in Reading, England. From a very young age, he fell in love with arts; first he started drawing, then doing sculptures and later photographing. He started his artistic career in the comic magazine “2000AD”, publishing works under the pseudonym of Chris Halls. Then, he participated in the creation of the special effects of “Alien 3”, “Alien: Resurrection” and “Judge Dredd”. But the project that gave him world fame was the video clip of the song “Come to Daddy” by Aphex Twin, an acclaimed composer of electronic music. In this video Cunningham challenges the imagination of the spectators while building his aesthetics in the creation of videos with endless series of monstrous and misshapen figures, where horror and terror are very close to us, they are actually totally immersed in the reality we know. As it might be easy to suppose, at the beginning he provoked a scandal in the commercial video world and especially in MTV, where there was an esthetic uniformity that was ignored by Cunningham in a very clever way. The video shows six-year-old children with adult faces running in a psychedelic city and as they hit fences with metal bars, he synchronizes the blows with the... read more

Lartigue’s Floating World- Madrid

Mónica Boixeda Madrilenian, Only-Be

The photographic exhibition of Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894 – 1986) can be seen in Caixa Forum in Madrid until the 19th of June. Perhaps the most impacting impression people have when visiting the exhibition is the facial expression of the other visitors as they move in slow motion through the different rooms, which seem to have been designed to stop time. Until 1963, Lartigue’s photographic works were completely anonymous, but after the success of his exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, his works started to receive their deserved recognition. From that very moment, his prestige has not stopped growing. That can be explained by the facial expressions we referred to in the first paragraph, since all of them show in different but unequivocal ways the invincible power of suggestion of some snapshots that he began to take when he was eight years old. These snapshots were taken almost daily, and they were accompanied by several brief texts, with the firm intention of facing the fleetingness and expiration of things. One of the most important concepts in Japanese aesthetics called mono no aware. We can approach its definition by saying that it alludes to a deep feeling of empathy towards the perishable beauty of things. That aspect is reflected in Lartigue’s photographs, who was able to photograph as nobody else did, the daily life of the Belle Epoque world –which by the way, was not separated from a certain obsession with the orientalism in general and particularly with the Japanese art–as well as the interwar period. As a document of a whole generation that felt constantly... read more