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Today we part from somewhere between a sunburned plaza and a memory that smells like lime and wet stone. And I want to talk about a man who didn’t just paint walls, he made them sing.
Today we celebrate the great Desiderio Hernández Xochitiotzin. Tlaxcalteca. Muralist. Time traveler with a brush.
Now Tlaxcala, that’s not the Mexico from the postcards. No turquoise margarita glow. Tlaxcala’s older. Quieter. Like it’s holding something in its chest. And if you grew up there — like I did — walking past the Government Palace almost everyday, craning your neck while your parents and your brothers tried to keep you moving along when time was short, or attempting to every single inauguration ceremony he had, you know what I mean.
Those murals weren’t decorations. They were weather systems. Xochitiotzin painted the story of Tlaxcala the way an old bluesman plays a 12-bar: slow, deliberate, full of ghosts. He put the pre-Hispanic world up there; warriors in feathered headdresses standing like mountains. Then the Spanish came in on horseback, armor shining like a bad idea. And somehow in his hands it wasn’t just conquest. It was collision. Complication. A whole civilization negotiating its own reflection. He had that old-school muralist blood in him, you can see the shadows of the masters Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros if you squint, but he wasn’t shouting slogans across the plaza. He was restoring memory. Piece by piece. Like somebody gluing together a shattered mirror and realizing it still shows your face. And for a kid growing up there, those murals weren’t “art.” They were background radiation. You go downtown for errands. You go for a Sunday walk. You go because your parents say you’re going. And there it is again, Cortés stepping onto Tlaxcalan soil. Indigenous nobles in long white tilmas. Battles that look almost choreographed, like a dance you don’t understand yet.
At first you just see color. Red like cochineal. Blue like oxidized sky. Gold leaf catching the afternoon sun. But then one day you realize, that’s your story up there. Not in a museum in Mexico City. Not in a textbook written somewhere else. It’s in your plaza. It’s breathing the same air you are.
Xochitiotzin had that patience. Decades working on those walls. You don’t rush a fresco. You lay pigment into wet plaster and you commit. No undo button. Like life in a small state that the rest of the country forgets exists, you paint it permanent or you don’t paint it at all.
Those murals were working on me the whole time. Seeping in sideways. Teaching me that history isn’t dead, it’s layered. It’s complicated. Tlaxcala fighting the Aztecs. Tlaxcala allying with the Spanish. Pride and controversy wrapped in the same cloak.
People talk about muralists like they’re politicians with paint. But Xochitiotzin felt more like a witness. He gave Tlaxcala back its epic scale. Made the small state cosmic. Made the plaza feel like the center of the universe. And there’s something about growing up with that, seeing imagination made public. Seeing your city’s ceilings turned into sky. It does something to you. It tells you your story matters enough to be monumental.
Walls can divide. Walls can crumble. But sometimes, if you’re lucky, a wall remembers.
This has been a little dispatch from the land of lime plaster and long memory. Keep your eyes on the buildings around you, folks. You never know which one is quietly telling you who you are.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Today we celebrate Sade, that’s Sade Adu, not the whole band, though the band’s always there like a good shadow at sundown.
Nigerian-born British singer Sade, short for Helene Folasade Adu, sings like she knows a secret she’s not gonna tell you, not all at once, anyway. She doesn’t chase the song; she lets the song come to her, like a cat on a hot afternoon. No wasted steps. No false confessions. Just that voice, smooth as polished stone, carrying stories that feel older than the calendar but somehow right on schedule. You hear a Sade record and suddenly the room changes shape. The lights dim themselves. The air gets heavy, like it’s about to rain, or already did. These aren’t songs that shout from the rooftops they lean in close, whisper something true, then pull back before you can ask too many questions. Love, loss, devotion, betrayal, yeah, all the big words but spoken softly, like they might break if you said them too loud.
There’s jazz in there, sure. Soul. A little R&B slipping in through the side door. But mostly there’s space. Space between the notes. Space for you to think about who you were when you first heard her, and who you are now. That’s the trick. Time doesn’t pass the same way when Sade’s playing. Three minutes can feel like a long night drive with nowhere you need to be.
She came up in the ’80s, a decade that liked things loud and shiny, but Sade went the other way cool, restrained, dressed in understatement. While everybody else was turning it up, she was turning it down, and somehow that made it last longer. Those records don’t wrinkle. They don’t age. They just wait. Sade doesn’t release albums often. She’s not chasing the clock or feeding the machine. She shows up when she’s got something to say, and then she disappears again, like a mirage that knows you’ll remember it better if it doesn’t stick around too long.
So if you’re out there tonight, driving with the radio low, or sitting alone with a glass that’s half full or half empty, Sade might be just what you need. Not to tell you what to do. Not to save you. Just to sit with you for a while and remind you that feeling deeply is still allowed. And that’s worth tuning in for.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Today we hit somewhere between a dusty road in Veracruz and a late-night bar where the shadows lean heavier than the men, there’s a voice to celebrate. That voice belongs to Chavela Vargas. Raw, unvarnished, and carrying stories that don’t end neatly.
And then she makes me cry.
Chavela Vargas starts out in Puerto Rico, 1919, where the air is thick with salt and saints, and the future doesn’t quite fit right. Some folks are born into homes. Others are born into departures. Chavela was the second kind.
So she leaves.
Not all at once. Not dramatically. More like a slow fade-out. By the time she’s a teenager, she’s already on her way to Mexico, alone, chasing something she couldn’t name yet. Maybe it was freedom. Maybe it was a sound she hadn’t heard but somehow already remembered.
Mexico in those days wasn’t just a country, it was a crossroads of ghosts and guitars. And Chavela stepped into it like she was stepping onto a stage that’s been waiting for her longer than anyone knew. Repeatedly she said that Mexico was calling her and that the country became her best parent in life.
Now here’s where the story starts bending a little.
They say she lost her sight when she was young. Darkness came in, settled down, made itself at home. And for a while, that’s the world she lived in. But Chavela wasn’t one for accepting the script as written.
So somewhere along the line—out past the edges of the official maps—she finds herself among shamans. Not the kind you read about in tidy books, but the kind that live where stories and reality shake hands and don’t quite let go.
And they work on her.
Not like doctors. More like translators. Translating the language of the body back into something the spirit can understand. Smoke, chants, maybe a little firelight flickering against things you can’t quite see even if your eyes are open.
And one day, just like that, or maybe not like that at all, the darkness lifts.
Chavela Vargas wasn’t just singing rancheras, she was pulling them apart, turning them inside out, making them confess. Those old Mexican songs about love and loss, she didn’t dress them up. She walked in wearing pants when the world said dresses, lit a cigarette when the room said behave, and sang like the night owed her something. There’s a truth in her voice that doesn’t sit still. It trembles, it cracks, it burns a little. You hear it and you think about all the things people leave unsaid. The heartbreaks that never made it into letters, the names you don’t say out loud anymore. She took those silences and gave them shape.
And then I cry.
Time followed her around like a stray dog. She disappeared for a while, drifted into the kind of darkness that doesn’t make headlines. But then she came back—older, sharper, carrying every mile in her throat. And when she sang again, it wasn’t about perfection. It was about survival.
What I always loved and caught my eye and ears is that almost myth-like feeling about her. You can picture her under a dim light, red serape draped over her shoulders, holding a note like it might shatter if she lets it go too soon. And maybe that’s the point, she makes you hold it with her.
So if you ever find yourself alone, early morning, late at night, with the world turned down low, put on one of her songs. Let it play all the way through. Don’t skip ahead. Don’t look for the chorus. Just sit with it.
Because Chavela Vargas didn’t sing to entertain you. She sang because something inside her refused to stay quiet.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
You know, there’s a certain kind of morning that only shows up in the far-north countries, where the sun’s got a mind of its own and decides to clock in around four. Not the brash sun of summer noon, not the lazy sun of winter, no, this one’s a shy guest, creeping in like it’s got an appointment no one told you about.
And there standing by the window with a cup of coffee, real coffee, the kind you make slow, in that Italian espresso way that sounds like a small engine warming up for a journey. The room’s already filled with this soft, unearned daylight, the kind that slips across the floorboards without asking permission. You look up, and there’s that Egon Schiele portrait on the wall. A face like a secret. Lines like they’re humming their own tune. It watches us the way art does when it’s too early for anything but honesty.
The smell in the room is its own kind of symphony. Books that have lived longer than you’ve been paying rent. Vinyl records stacked like old friends with stories that don’t mind being repeated. Lilies in a jar that breathe out their perfume like they’re trying to tell you about last night’s dream. And all of it folds itself into the scent of that espresso. Bitter, warm, alive.
You take a sip. Outside, the world hasn’t quite remembered itself yet. The pigeons are dancing their morning dance, birds clear their throats. A bicycle chain rattles somewhere down the street. But inside, you’ve already stepped into the day. The sunlight’s climbing, the steam’s rising, and for just a moment you feel like you’re listening to a record that only exists once, only plays now, and only for you.
Early morning in Sweden. Coffee by the window. And the day just beginning to hum its tune.
A pictorial work is defined as a visual stimulus that produces an aesthetic impact on the viewer and transmits a message, in addition to capturing its historical and cultural context. The ancestral classification of aesthetic activities was referred to again by Charles Batteux in his theory of fine arts, thus returning to the importance of music and its evolution. Few artistic objects have been able to create multiple and sensory effects while also being massive products as the vinyl cover.
One of the most fascinating characteristics of music is its instant capacity to exalt the senses, that magical effect that allows you to disconnect from everyday reality to get lost in a sound and multi-sensory journey. For some artists, music needs visual art to be attractive and visual art needs music to create a new experience. This is how these two fine arts have always been linked. In fact it is very likely that there is not even a clear separation.
So, why is this musical and pictorial work as an archive important to lift, keep alive and respect just like the great paintings of the Renaissance? What does it say about our present and what can it tell forthcoming generations?
The vinyl cover is not merely packaging; it is a portable altarpiece. It is the fresco of the industrial age, the illuminated manuscript of electricity. To dismiss it as design ephemera is to misunderstand how images migrate from cathedral walls to department store bins. When The Beatles released “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”, the cover was not a marketing device but a manifesto in collage, a crowded Renaissance of pop that rivaled the perspectival ambition of a Florentine chapel. When Pink Floyd encased “The Dark Side of the Moon” in a prism, it offered a metaphysical diagram as severe and iconic as a Suprematist cross.
To walk through a contemporary museum today is, too often, to encounter the bureaucratization of shock: vinyl slogans enlarged to architectural scale, ready-made provocations laminated into safety. The gesture repeats itself with a deadpan smirk, as if irony were still a subversive tool and not the exhausted currency of curatorial fashion.
One hears the ghost of Camille Paglia demanding a return to awe, to the Dionysian voltage that once electrified art before it was house-trained by grant committees. She would remind us that true art is dangerous because it channels primal forces, not because it prints profanity in Helvetica.
The vinyl sleeve, at its height, carried that voltage. It was erotic, theatrical, mythic. It did not apologize for beauty; it weaponized it. In an era when the museum gift shop threatens to outshine the gallery, we should ask whether the most democratic art of the late twentieth century was not hanging on bedroom walls, thumbtacked above turntables, absorbing cigarette smoke and adolescent longing. These covers were handled, worn, inhabited. They were not sanctified behind glass but baptized in use.
There is, as Donald Kuspit has argued in other contexts, a difference between art that sublimates and art that merely simulates profundity. The vinyl cover often sublimated: it condensed political unrest, sexual revolution, technological optimism, and spiritual hunger into a single square meter of cardboard. It metabolized chaos into composition. Compare this with the cool sterility of much installation art today, which announces its criticality like a press release. The vinyl cover never needed wall text; its theology was immediate.
I hear Tom Wolfe sharpening his white suit against the spectacle of contemporary art fairs—status rituals disguised as radicalism—while overlooking the riotous sincerity of graphic designers who dared to imagine mass culture as a cathedral. The audacity was not in pretending to despise commerce but in infiltrating it, smuggling high symbolism into suburban living rooms. That was Pop’s true revenge.
And what would the authentic, bold, woman of my taste, mexican art critic Avelina Lésper say of a museum that elevates a crumpled tarp yet ignores the visual intelligence of an album sleeve that shaped a generation’s imagination?
I know.
She would likely denounce the fraud of institutional validation divorced from craft. The vinyl cover required drawing, typography, composition, printing mastery—skills now often eclipsed by conceptual grandstanding. It demanded collaboration between musician, photographer, illustrator, and art director: a gesamtkunstwerk of the reproducible age. James Elkins might gently remind us that images survive not because institutions decree their importance but because viewers continue to look at them.
The question, then, is phenomenological: what do we see when we see a vinyl cover? We see time crystallized. We see hairstyles, political anxieties, utopian dreams. We see the analog texture of a pre-digital world where scale mattered, where the square format became an arena for formal experimentation as rigorous as any canvas.
To preserve and elevate these musical-pictorial artifacts is not nostalgia; it is historiography. They tell future generations that art once circulated hand to hand, that beauty could be mass-produced without being spiritually bankrupt, that the boundary between high and low culture was porous and productive. They testify to an era when the aesthetic experience began before the needle touched the groove.
If the Renaissance altarpiece instructed the faithful how to see the divine, the vinyl cover instructed the modern subject how to see the self—fragmented, ecstatic, rebellious, yearning. It is an archive of desire. And perhaps what disturbs the contemporary museum is precisely this: that meaning once erupted from collaboration, craft, and public hunger, not from theoretical opacity.
To defend the vinyl cover as fine art is to defend intensity against indifference, form against formlessness, and memory against the amnesia of trends. It is to insist that art does not become noble by being scarce, but by being necessary.
up: detail "The Garden of Earthly Delights", between 1490-1510, Hieronmyus Bosch.
down: “Little Creatures”, 1985, The Talking Heads, album cover created by the much outsider artist Howard Finster.
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Her hand hovers near her mouth, ringed, deliberate, unsure whether it’s about to speak or stay silent. There’s a device at her ear something that listens as much as it speaks. She looks like someone caught mid-transmission.
A painted face from another century stares back with the same alarm, but heavier, darker, more final. The skin is bruised by shadow, the eye rimmed with a fear that has already learned its own name. One hand grips the head not in vanity, not in despair exactly, but in the sudden realization that the mind has outrun the body. This is a Baroque gesture, all drama and consequence, where emotion is not internal but carved into flesh and fabric.
You could talk about chiaroscuro here, and you probably should. The painting leans on it, the way terror blooms out of darkness, the way the face seems to surface from the void. The photograph refuses it. Everything is exposed. Nothing hides. And yet the emotion is the same, which tells us something inconvenient about history: that time changes the tools, not the feeling.
Because what this image really stages is a meeting. Not past and present, but repetition. The artist, knowingly or not, has stepped into a pose that already existed, a gesture already haunted. Art history likes to call this “quotation,” but that’s too polite. This feels more like possession.
And as a woman writing about art, you can’t ignore the gendered shift. The original painted figure is trapped in a moral drama: sin, revelation, divine reckoning. The contemporary figure is caught in something quieter but no less severe: self-surveillance, constant awareness, the pressure to be visible and interpretable at all times. One fears God. The other fears the mirror, the feed, the archive. Both figures hold their heads as if to keep them from splitting open.
So the image doesn’t ask which is real and which is imitation. It asks why the expression still fits. Why the face, centuries later, still knows exactly how to look when the mind stumbles onto an unbearable truth.
“The Desperate Man” 1843–45, Gustave Courbet
Project stones by stone.
By me and my #iphotos
My composition and observations
#visualartist #artofvisual
The house as a museum.
Now some people think museums are cold places. Marble floors. Guards who look like they’ve been guarding the same thought since 1963. But I’m indeed somewhere else where the walls lean in like they’ve got something to tell you, and every object is tagged with a memory instead of a date.
Lights are low, like they’re trying not to wake the ghosts. Plants stand around like they’ve been there longer than you have. A lamp glows the way a good song does, insisting. You don’t flip a switch so much as you arrive.
On the wall, pictures aren’t hung so much as collected. Not lined up like soldiers, but clustered like thoughts that refuse to be alphabetized. Masks, photographs, paintings, old diagrams of the human body, reminders that we’re all just exhibits with fragile joints and borrowed time. An Acapulco chair waits in the corner, not for sitting, but for thinking about sitting. There’s a difference.
In a museum like this, nothing’s behind glass. The books are shelved low, where you can reach them without asking permission, my friend’s kids and my nephews are more than welcome to touch everything, cause I know the feeling of wanting to touch but not being allowed to. Terrible feeling.
The desk it’s still warm from the last idea that passed through. That globe of light on the table, well, that’s not a lamp, that’s the moon clocking in for the night shift.
Every room is curated, but by instinct, not budget. No plaques, no arrows on the floor. You wander. I linger. I recognize myself in things I didn’t know I left there.
In my home, scent is part of the collection. It drifts from room to room, curling around the frames, settling into the spines of the books. Museums usually tell you not to touch, but this one gets you through the nose first. That’s how it sneaks past your defenses.
And then there’s the music.
Vinyl, spinning slow, like it’s got nowhere better to be. You can hear the room inside the sound, little pops and cracks like the house clearing its throat before it speaks. The song doesn’t fill the space so much as measure it. Corners soften. Shadows find their rhythm. Even the furniture seems to listen.
My inherited record player from grandpa sits there like a modest altar. No blinking lights, no digital promises. Just gravity and groove. Each side of an album feels like a gallery wing: you commit, you stay, you don’t skip ahead unless you’re ready to admit you’re restless.
Incense in the air, flowers in a jar, vinyl on the turntable, now the house isn’t just a museum, it’s a broadcast. A late-night transmission to anyone tuned in closely enough. Every song leaves a residue. Every smell leaves a trace. By morning, the walls remember what I played and how long I stayed up with it.
Some houses echo. Mine hums. Some museums tell you what mattered. My home tells you what still does.
So if your house feels a little crowded with objects, a little heavy with stories, don’t rush to clean it up. You might just be living in a permanent exhibition. Open late. Free admission. No gift shop on the way out.
A Glitch "Aisha Qandisha ~ Ètude I”
by ™℗®© Louis M o n t i e l
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#visualartists #glitchart #glitch #glitché #pixelsorting #glitchartistscollective #glitchvideo #datamosh #digitalglitch #videoglitch #hyperspektiv #minimalart #videoart #dfkt #pixelsorter #artistsvisual #glitchartoninstagram #glitchartscollective #glitcharts #glitchartistcommunity #glitchartwork #error #glitchartists #glitchartcommunity #glitchartistcollective #glitchartist #pixelsortingart #proceduralart #creativecodeart #glitchportrait
Alternate view of 8 Expressions, a wall sculpture by Kim Weller. My main source material for this project was the Walt Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and the infamous Black Dahlia Murder in LA.118 x 54 x 54 inches. Acrylic paint, glitter flake. molded urethane foam,
Today time smells like whiskey and roses crushed under a boot heel, and that brings us to celebrate Janis Joplin.
Janis Joplin didn’t sing songs so much as she wrestled them to the floor. She came out of Port Arthur, Texas, where the sidewalks remember every lie you ever told. She carried that place with her, even when she left it behind. Especially when she left it behind.
Her voice sounded like it had already lived a full life before it ever hit the microphone. Like it had stayed up too late, loved the wrong people, and still showed up for work the next morning. That kind of voice doesn’t ask permission. It just tells the truth and lets the chips scatter wherever they want. You listen to that track “Call on me” and you’ll be arriving somewhere you have never been before.
Now, one thing Joplin and I have in common is that we ran with the boys. Always did. Bands full of men, rooms full of men, laughter bouncing off the walls like empty bottles. Some folks say Joplin felt more at ease there, less judged, less measured, accepted. Around men, she could be loud, messy, brilliant, and broken all at once without anyone asking her to smooth the edges. With women, the mirrors came out, and if you ask me they still do, comparison, competition, old wounds from high school hallways that never really close. That doesn’t mean she didn’t admire women. She did. She just didn’t always trust the room they put her in. Joplin knew how cruel crowds could be, and sometimes the hardest crowds are the ones that know your reflection a little too well.
She dressed loud, walked smiling. Feathers, beads, velvet, scars you couldn’t see but could hear plain as day. And when she sang about love, it wasn’t the Valentine kind. It was the kind you beg for, borrow, and sometimes steal knowing full well it won’t stay.
Janis Joplin lived fast because time was already tapping her on the shoulder. Some people stretch time out like a long highway. Others burn it down to a single matchstick. Janis was the flame bright, shaking, impossible to ignore. She didn’t want to be protected. She wanted to be heard. And she was. Still is. Every time that needle drops, she steps out of the speakers, boots first, daring the world to look away. And time? Time just stands there, listening, pretending it doesn’t care even though it knows it lost that round.
That’s Janis Joplin. No safety net. No apologies. Just a voice that refuses to sit down and behave.
ink, watercolor on paper
contact ibarraloana@gmail.com
Kim Weller "CYMK Pillows" 2002
metal chain, glitter, pom poms, leatherette, batting, image transfer, resin
Davor Gromilović is a visual artist currently residing in Sombor, Serbia (born in Yugoslavia, 1985).
Although contemporary drawing represents the primary field of his creative exploration and development, he also shows creative abilities and genuine commitment to other artistic forms such as painting, illustration, graphics, murals, art fanzines, etc.
His work is narrative and often inspired by fantastic motives of fairy tales, folk-art, pop surrealism, sci-fi, and even by north renaissance masters of painting, as well as by his personal experiences and inner world. In his work one notices a dominant use of symbols, his inner world and complex reflections from which he develops ideas and specific intimate aesthetics. Complex, but at the same time purified, strongly imaginative but well-thought-out works adorn this artist’s rich oeuvre.
His work has been published in numerous books, magazines and publications from around the world.
Obra: En Casa/ En Kabul.
Autor: Tony Kushner.
Dirección: Carlos Gandolfo.
Labor: Diseño de Escenografía. (Junto a Carlos Gandolfo y Florencia Del Gener)
Diseño de Vestuario. (Junto a Florencia Del Gener).
Teatro: Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires Teatro San Martín.
Sala Casacuberta
Temporada: 2004.
Fotos: Mariana Del Gener.