These two texts are born from two conferences given by the author at the MNCARS. Warburg and Einstein are usually described as marginal or anachronistic. Lahuerta emphasises that marginality and anachronism are precisely what allowed them to provide a material vision of art from the centre of their own time, against traditional historiography categories and the operative model developed by modernity. Warburg, through accumulation, and Einstein, through denuding, kept an incorruptible compromise between their thinking and their living, placing themselves in opposite poles to "organic intellectual", which led them to think that it was more important to leave the office and take action than to take refuge in the ivory tower of word.

The book collects the essays Arte y religión: reparos a una componenda and Las risas de Pornos, reflections going against the exhibitions ‘El pan de los ángeles’ and ‘Las lágrimas de Eros’. Two essays, specular somehow, investigate the possibility of the existence of a religious art and a pornographic art.

Apparently irreducible, the formal manifestations of religion and pornography turn out to be a lot closer that we usually suppose. The beautiful, attractive, desirable, miraculous, the engendering power, carnality, spirituality, pleasure or pain and the ecstasy they can cause, are concepts that intertwine around the body (an inscription surface) and the psyche (a libidinal language).

From the tattooed bodies of the Russian prisoners, the author goes through several cases and artistic works with his usual erudition and at the same time with surprising originality and sense of humour, to come to the suspicion that the true art is incompatible, ultimately, with the genuine religious devotion as well as the scopic pornographic urgency.

Through these pages parade architects, painters and artists as diverse as Wright, Fujimoto, Borromini, Kuma, Zaera, Xiaogang, Hundertwaser, Hsiang, Monet, Kapoor, Vasarely, Oribe or Escher, and also things, objects and spaces as mysterious and suggestive as fleeting clouds, distorting mirrors, zen gardens, children’s play rooms, the false perspective of the Spada gallery or the resounding non-pluck strings of a sitar.

What could all this tumultuous welter of people and things have in common? All of them are connected by their different approaches to common subjects: the transitory, fugitive, unstable and indistinct. Thus, the author proposes the term phenotopology to create a concept that brings together phenomenology and topology, that is, the appearing of things to our understanding and the continuous space in which they meet.

Félix Ruiz de la Puerta is an expert in oriental art especially Chinese and Japanese, and his vast direct knowledge of these refined millenary cultures allows him to expound with clarity ideas alien to our occidental sensibility. Ideas that broaden our views on our own artistic universe, which help us to understand it in a deeper way and which allow us to relate it to our daily life, in the conviction that the most relevant products of the artistic work are inseparable from the holistic way their authors have of understanding life.

Valery said that shapeless forms do not leave any memory but that of a possibility. The recurrent construction of vision, the permanent expansion of sensibility, the eternal reference to human scale and the recognition of our body as indispensable mediator of the relation mind-world configure a new phenomenological beauty of unexpected pertinence in a reality ever more fluctuating.

Perhaps there is no way to understand filmmaking or architecture, or any other artistic expression, but to take them out of their context. This is the way that authors follow. They do not look for coincidences between the different arts, do not try to establish parallelisms between filmmaking and architecture but that a particular film scene, what the spectator perceives on the film screen: light, darkness, framing, depth of field, action, spatial construction, and so on, are able to bring to light the spatial configuration of architecture as very often the built form hides from the spectator view and vice versa. The work hypothesis of authors is very simple: the gesture. The gesture, as spontaneous manifestation of the artist, is the fundament of any kind of art. Thus he makes us understand John Wayne’s famous rifle scene in the film The Stagecoach by John Ford, with the fact of opening the gate of a garden. Or that a path in Vienna’s cemetery serves to understand the construction of the courtyard in the Salk Institute by Louis Kahn. This text is a tool, a filter that, relying on a poetic language, tries to bring to the surface the deepest intentions of the studied feature films and architectures.

Six films, six travels that generate an architectonic experience through the symbolic, collecting dimensions developed in parallel to other artistic disciplines that reinforce the starting hypothesis. This work, rather than comment the evident, pursuits to make visible the invisible to make the reading impregnated with a kind of revelation.

This book exudes philosophic wisdom, profound science and erudite speculations but at all times knows how to sharpen our understanding in an easy and harmonious way, enchanting us. This is helped by the method used by the author, which consists in supporting the discourse on theories and architectonic buildings as well as on works coming from other artistic disciplines. This book is a tribute to the arts and everything that can be discovered in them. Its Renaissance and universal character reveal us the relationships, close to phenomenology, between architectonic spaces and man.

Amongst the diverse configurations that can be adopted by what surround our being in space, the author has chosen three suggestive possibilities, rich in symbolic, mythic, atavistic and archetypical possibilities: the Wood, the Desert and the Cave. His descriptions recover memories, recollections and emotions with which our ancestors helped to build the collective subconscious of the present man. Amongst these configurations the Cave is perhaps the most primitive, the most primeval because we are all sons of the caveman. The Desert is explained in relation to wind which is the giver of shape; is, therefore, a liquid space, because the sand escapes through our fingers like water. The Wood, dark, deep and unfathomable, through a magical setting of mysterious lights it creates an architecture of the intangible and the ethereal.

Entertaining and clear, but also demanding and daring, the story that the author has been weaving is a humanistic adventure that requires readers with intrepid hearts. What Félix de la Puerta does is to invite us to begin a journey with him that has the objective of reaching a more creative and richer perception of architecture as well as space itself.

A collection of the texts written by Ángel Gónzalez García in the last years, who received the award Premio Nacional de Ensayos 2011. In these essays he reflects on diverse subjects always related to art. Amongst the writings intertwines a common plot that asserts the essentially carnal nature of the artistic experience.