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INTRODUCTION “HAPPILY EVER AFTER”
All vomit, even that returned by the sweetest of dishes, is always sour

Who says the story can’t be told a different way? Who says Snow White can’t be an old crone in a vegetative coma, still waiting for the kiss that will awaken her from the eternal sleep? Who says the seven dwarfs were bullfighters? Who says Prince Charming can’t spend his time whoring? How do we know Narcissus didn’t get so fed up of staring at himself that he died from an overdose of heroin? Who says Pinocchio didn’t get an erection every time he told a lie, and shagged some primitive Barbie doll? Who says the Enchanted Woods were ‘cruising park ‘ where gays and prostitutes had sex between the bushes? Who says the end is always happy? Beneath the glossy, bright surfaces are hidden Goya’s monsters.

Taking these and similar questions as starting point, I am presenting the series of work-in process- Happily Ever After. These pieces are questions of the history, with big and heavy letter, that we have accepted as real and true without doubting any of its premises. Who says that what we have learnt as “truth” it really was? Now a day we are being conscious that all information we get via any kind of media it has been manipulated and censored. Probably it has been always like this. In this way, all what we have been taught as the history, our history, loose its objectivity and credibility. The past and the present get darker and we get lost in them. We could see ourselves with a skull in my hand, realizing that time lines do not move in one way. This body of work brings up subjects such as education, power, sexuality, morality, cultural diversity, traditions, mortality, politics and human rights.

In the series Happily Ever After I play constantly with the concept of reality: what is real but it doesn’t look like and viceversa. All the characters and places that appear in the images are real, that means they are representing themselves, without being dressed in character or playing someone they are not. At the same time, the frames of the pictures look like original antiques but they are copies in cheap a light polyurethane. In this way, I ironies about what it has been considerate an art piece in the most classical, bourgeois and institutional way. Happily Ever After does not give affirmations, it questions.

                                                                                                          Carlos Aires Antwerpen 2005