ABSTRACT
The visually grotesque disrupts the very idea of transparency, a notion that is largely praised by politicians, scholars, and militants. "Grotesque transparency" conveys a paradox since the shocking impact of the horrific, disgusting, ugly, or deformed often blurs the issue at hand and produces opacity. A theory of grotesque transparency will approach the public communication manifestations as expressions that are out of the norm. From the perspective of an aesthetic of action, grotesque transparency is a way to disclose knowledge, linking it to the experience of shock or disruption caused by an ugly but also real or authentic image. The ambiguity of grotesque transparency derives from the esperpento's quality of "tragedy that is not tragedy", easily navigating from one genre to another, from the dramatic to the comedic and vice versa. The aquarium metaphor also allows us to understand grotesque transparency as a double-way process where the inside and the outside are part of the same system.
