Beauties and beasts: Razvan Boar, Daniel Dobarco, Luis de la Fuente, Alex Gambin, Lisa Ivory, Maite y Manuel, Gema Quiles

Beauties and beasts is the first group exhibition curated by Juan de Morenilla at VETA by Fer Francés. The works gathered for this exhibition coincide in an approach to the aesthetic mythology created around the concepts of the beautiful and the grotesque, but from a perspective that does not confront them, but quite the opposite. The seven artistsincluded in the exhibition, Razvan Boar, Daniel Dobarco, Luis de la Fuente, Alex Gambin, Lisa Ivory, the collective Maite y Manuel and Gema Quiles, each one from their particular practice, work in an ambivalent zone. An ambiguous territory where the monstrous is also vulnerable and delicate, where violence may exist, but is shown under a tame, almost soft aspect, and where the macabre becomes admirable due to the technical thoroughness used when portraying it.

The very term "grotesque" derives from a type of ornamental motif discovered in the 15th century during the excavation of the Baths of Titus. So named because of the "grottoes" in which they were found. Forms that mixed the human, the animal and the vegetable. Fantastic designs that opposed the logical categories of classical art. Because the beautiful and the ugly is an oscillation, like that of two razor blades that mutually sharpen each other and with whose friction they become corrupted to reach the optimum state. Corrupt and optimum conjure up a strange symbiosis, like ugly and extraordinary or beautiful and abject. Think of a color scheme nourished by complementary colors, a chocolate bar with salt or a dog with heterochromia. The seven artists, each one from their practice, show us with their work this state of oscillation, this constant sharpness that suggests that clean, surgical, almost imperceptible cut between the beautiful and the monstrous.

As Mark Fisher suggests, the idea that we enjoy what scares us doesn't quite account for the appeal that the weird and spooky possess. In fact, it has more to do with a fascination with the external, with that which is beyond ordinary perception, cognition, and experience. The weird, that which should not be there, as well as the creepy, that which is there when there should be nothing and vice versa, thus partake of the sublime. Something strangely familiar, an element that bursts in and interrupts, an ill-timed note that in turn harmonizes the composition and opens its meaning. That of a vertical organ, of an elevated structure, regular and solid in front of the earthly, the insects that invade it dilate and externalize what happens inside. Inside and outside, the skin and the entrails, like that of a painting that reveals a new image on its reverse side. This game becomes a noun, a context that gives rise to fantasy, a space where covens that hide and show themselves occur. A frame of the impossible where orcs are knights and dragons are their equines.