A LETTER CONCERNING ENTHUSIASM

“A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm” takes its title and starting point from a philosophical letter written in 1707 by the british thinker Anthony Ashley Cooper, earl of Shaftesbury. The exhibition explores the dark sides embedded in the understanding of enthusiasm during modernity in Europe, when this feeling was devalued and dismissed, being considered a source of obsession, fanatism and violence.

The works of the artists on view in the exhibition reenact this understanding describing in a variety of ways the defeat, during the XX century, of revolutionary ideologies overloaded by enthusiasm, showing the point in which enthusiasm reveals its failure collapsing into boredom and inactivity.