GOYA TRAS LA CORTINILLA
23 /12/22 al 19 /03/22
GOYA DOMAIN
Among the various things I owe Ignacio Guelbenzu for is the recipe for the baked pork leg with mojo and garlic that I have just prepared. Besides having a truly fun and cacophonous name (in Spanish), it is also very tasty. I found this Christmas rehearsal lunch, which I will of course repeat on that day, on www.goya.com. Quite surprising, right? The domain in question, with the name Goya by itself, corresponds to a Latin food company. There are other, more serious domains, such as museogoya.ibercaja.es, fundaciongoyaenaragon.es, territoriogoya.eu, and so on, but the genuine and substantial one is this one.
These Goya products are very easy to find in any Latin American shop, call shop or Islamic butcher's shop. Guelbenzu specifically bought a tin of beans, which he then used to produce several works that are very Guelbenzu. On a large vertical methacrylate surface, the smashed and squashed red and black beans, serve to produce an all-over painting, as a sort of stele, through which Goya's signature navigates, controlling the traffic of chaos. The stains of the crushed beans and the name of the master of painting are the protagonists of four other pieces. If anyone had taken Don Francisco's name in vain, his honour has been restored by the disciple.
Goya’s bean tin holds a competitive advantage with regards to the Campbell's soup can since it gets meta-artistic points. But the flirting between consumer goods and Goya is not new. Gutiérrez Solana was already amused by the affair and, in his "Tertulia del Pombo", he painted a matchbox with "Leocadia", the melancholic custodian of the Quinta del Sordo, on the right-hand-side of the table, next to the hand of his friend and illustrator Salvador Bartolozzi. In fact, there was a whole collection of Goyaesque matches, just as there are stamps, wine labels, cigar vellums or prepaid telephone cards.
As part of his technological recycling strategy, and thanks to second-hand websites, Jorge Isla acquired a beautiful collection of these telephone cards and put them together in a sort of mosaic. They represent scenes of children's games, those from the Santamarca collection, by an early and costumbrist Goya. The repetition of these motifs reaches an obsessive point, as in those coffee sets with Millet motifs collected by the paranoiac-critical Salvador Dalí, bringing us close to the pathological.
Goya on the supermarket shelf. Again and again. Let us remember, however, that Goya put his Caprichos on sale in a perfume and liquor shop, at Desengaño 1. Therefore, everything seems to start and return to those neighbourhood stores. Album of 80 prints, at the price of 320 reales de vellón, in that shop, located at the same building where he lived.
This is how the product was advertised in the Diario de Madrid, on February 4th 1799: “Collection of prints of whimsical subjects, invented and etched by Don Francisco de Goya. The author is convinced that censuring human errors and vices—although it seems the preserve of oratory arid poetry—may also be a worthy object of painting. As subjects appropriate to his work, he has selected from the multitude of stupidities and errors common to every civil society, and from the ordinary obfuscations arid lies condoned by custom, ignorance, or self-interest, those he has deemed most fit to furnish material for ridicule, and at the same time to exercise the author's imagination.”
Does the approach ring a bell? The purpose of the Caprichos continues to this day. With those engravings, a space was opened up for the public, for politics, for social criticism in art. Another premises, the Antonia Puyó gallery, located at Madre Sacramento, 31, Zaragoza, offers products that refresh and update this Goyaesque idea that art is not only for being, but also for other things, such as interpreting and questioning reality. And that even so, paradoxically, with this commitment, art gains a certain freedom in its form, in the way of doing things, which was not enjoyed when decorating the palaces of kings. This corner shop or gallery represents freedom. We can feel stuffed with Goya, or imagine Goya stuffed with Goya beans, as Guelbenzu proposes, but also take advantage of it and paint with it; we can frame the vicious reiteration, as will Jorge Isla.
We are in Zaragoza, where Goya was used during Franco years to advertise a series of beautiful Spring festivals where, among other things, a Majas contest was held in which the aspirants paraded in their mantillas before the eyes of the dignitaries, ladies in mourning like Leocadia, with their skirts a little above the knee. What a good theme for a Capricho of Goya's! The ladies of late-Francoist society looking at the Majas suitors with cynical eyes. Their husbands, with vicious eyes.
“Conceited girls will have a seat when they put it on their heads.” This explanation was given by Goya for his Capricho number 26: "They already have a seat", where these girls can be seen with a chair on their heads, seating them in the literal sense. Olalla Gómez takes Goya at his word and materialises it, moreover, in feminist terms, with the famous concept of the glass ceiling. Again, as in Bruegel, as in Goya, when idioms materialise, when you take language to heart, things change and empty words regain their meaning.
Goya's Caprichos and drawings are full of petimetres, young girls and old women exhibiting themselves or looking at themselves in the mirror. In our time, this place of personal exhibition are no longer the avenues and boulevards, but Instagram. In Cecilia de Val's "selfies", the image is degraded, diluted, just like all the images that the artist has been handling, who more than a manipulator of them, is a witness to their immolation, inviting us to accompany her and see how the photos slip from her hands, or rather from her sight. A "crisis" of the image, an image of the crisis of these times, says Cecilia de Val, similar to another one —two hundred and twenty years ago—, a crisis that was perhaps even greater than ours, when the images of power unmasked themselves and, in a collective suicide, were transferred to that deposit of detritus that is the museum. Goya, however, shall be the artist who continues to make museums uncomfortable.
Goya pointed to custom, ignorance and interest as guarantors of extravagance and nonsense. The prevailing interest, which has grown enormously, is the justification for the generalised real estate nonsense. David Latorre continues to write his truths with broken bricks in the Goyaesque manner. WASTELAND. The wasteland as an unfulfilled promise. No place, like the archetypal Goyaesque no place; the type of scene of his engravings; the precursor stage of the theatre of the absurd. Speculation and indebtedness become one of those bogeymen that haunt us.
Those desolate spaces are propitious to the appearance of the bogeymen and also to witches' councils. Leandro Fernández de Moratín, Goya's friend, seemed to be the most balanced and sensible of writers. And yet he dealt with witches and the trials against them. Precisely because he was a rational man, he questioned the irrational. With Goya, in painting these same subjects, even in approaching them with the irony with which he approached them in the Caprichos, much of the sulphurous seduction of the witchcraft survives. And so does The Great He-Goat, of course. Víctor Solanas-Díaz, inspired by Goya, recovers an early work of his, from when he collaborated with his grandfather Manuel, a taxidermist: a stuffed male head, the eyes of which seem to see more than we think, observing how the people continue to anoint their bodies with placebo potions, in order to imagine virtual flights.
Alejandro J. Ratia
Zaragoza December, 2021