El ogro

El ogro (‘The ogre’) is an artist’s book by Javier Codesal that brings together five phrases. The phrases – by Marcel Broodthaers, Manuel Olveira, Meret Oppenheim, the prophet Jeremiah and Codesal himself – are drawn, and they express a searching, a need to know, a delving into the issues that concern and agitate the artist, a resolution to get dirty in order to find, an archaeological rummaging around the foundations of the ruins after a quake; but they also illustrate a patient and curious gazing at what is to come. The prelude to a convulsion of love, sexuality, violence and affection. The ambiguous poetics of sexual connection.

Javier Codesal (Sabiñánigo, Huesca, 1958) is a visual artist and poet. Amongst other issues, he has dealt with the body as a place of difference, a place of eroticism and enjoyment, but also of fragility, illness and death, as in the series DÍAS de SIDA (‘DAYS of AIDS’, 1989-1996). The MUSAC exhibited in 2015 an anthology of his work called Ponte el cuerpo (‘Place Your Body’); in 2009, La Virreina Centre de la Imatge devoted another retrospective show to him under the title Dentro y fuera de nosotros (‘Inside and Outside of Us’); and, in 1999, he exhibited in the Espacio Uno at the Reina Sofía Museum. His most recently published collection of poetry is Un eclipse no se elige (‘An Eclipse is Unchosen’, Amargord, 2018).

This book has been published for the exhibition of the same name at the Fundación Seoane, opened on 8th July 2019.