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The Temptations of Courbet

From Courbet's dreams and fears

2017 - 2022

Courbet's temptations could be the life we dare not live:

the people we want to merge with or the places we want to travel despite the terror of throwing ourselves into the void.
José Luis Serzo uses the painter Gustav Courbet as an excuse to take us to a stage where pleasure, eroticism and guilt dance; a pictorial and sculptural reverie that teaches us the world without fuss or filters.

From the dreams and fears of Courbet imagined by Serzo we witness a study of erotica linked to fantasy, banished long ago from the sex we practice in this society of omniscreen.





Serzo studies in this exhibition the sexuality lived as a game and approaches the female anatomy with an authority that almost frightens; bodies that are landscapes, postures that are the stellar motion of the universe.

It fills them with pulsating iconographies, death masks, flowers, eroticized garlic and a sea of crimson curtains that crave skirts towards the madness of feeling, losing precisely the senses with it. And so, he tells us that to live intensely is also to approach death.


Lidón Sancho Ribés. Art critic and writer