“The theater of cruelty: a reading in three acts” is an exhibition conceptualized by Darío Escobar, which brings together within General Expenses gallery a selection of artists whose practice coincides, in a diverse and heterodox way, with the idea of spectacle and spectator. The script of the show generates a rupture within the conceptual-discursive lines of the practice of each of the invited artists, taking as a starting point a work by Guillermo Santamarina commissioned for this exhibition.

“The theater of cruelty” more than an exhibition, takes up the text essay by the poet and playwright Antonin Artaud, Le théâtre et son double (1938), in which the revolutionary French artist focuses on the fractals that mystify reality and representation, assuming that the world is a giant stage in which we are all prisoners. Have we overcome this idea or has it become more acute with mass media and posthumanism?

The show is articulated in three acts. The first, La  peste (The Plague), the reading of this act interrogates in search of the symptom, the idea of a body without organs and the body as a scenario of pain or pleasure as a collective and the individual.  The second act, El Actor (The Actor), as the one who exercises the representation and how it falls within a social construction that is invented from its own structure and interprets its own role, will it be able to leave the stage or is the world an extension of the stage? Finally, the third act is composed by the idea of El Aplauso (The Applause) as a result of an instant gratification closely related to current practices and social networks, a space where it is impossible for an action not to have an immediate approval or repudiation.


The exhibition is accompanied by three critical texts by Darío Escobar, Michel Blancsubé and Javier Payeras.