This month's festive frame is so on two levels! I have no doubt you are already deeply admiring my Yuletide garnish ( i get but one chance a year after all. ) Seasonally attired as it is, this print is from an exhibition curated as part of an entirely separate festivity.
This year's Spanish Film and Arts Festival took place over the last month with screenings in multiple venues throughout the city. In true Spanish fashion, not content with just showing feature length films, the festival exposed its roots through short films, animation, live music, house-warmings, exhibitions, food and topped off with Goya nominated diamonds of cinema. And in true Spanish fashion, everything was everywhere at every time! What could complete the buzz better than running from flamenco, through a freezing Christmas thoroughfare, to arrive at a warm screening already in full swing.
This image of Omar Arráez is just about the full stop of a reflexive portrait of the artist! At once a sculptor, illustrator and painter, his portraits capture the most divinely detailed stories of unknown faces, and all on paper. By pressing, pinching and shading his page he quite literally writes his subject's story from ceiling to floor. The process warps the paper and it curls from the wall bursting with physicality and embedded with wrinkles and lifelines and stories. For me I would love to see one out in the sun for a few years, to watch it age with its own grace as the subjects within do.
The exhibition is running for a few more weeks at the Axolotyl Gallery on Dundas Street, and also as a collaborative exhibition at the cosy FilmHouse Bar. Better step in out of the cold.
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