The darkest, most macabre and most modern Francisco de Goya is that of his engravings. Among them, the series Absurdity It is the most hermetic and the least known about its creative process. Deformed, two-headed or carnivalesque beings swarm throughout his 22 engravings, exercising or suffering violence and confronting a dark world. For this quality of showing the sordid side of the human condition, and therefore of society, the artist Lita Cabellut (Sariñena, 63 years old) chose these impressions of what she considers her first teacher to make a reading of 35 works in the exhibition. Goya x Lita Cabellut. The nonsenseopen from October 30 to January 26 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in San Fernando.
“I feel the Absurdity as the most primitivist, disruptive and radical creations of Goya’s work, but at the same time I understand them as the most contemporary stories that best reflect the flaws of current society. Selfishness, brutality, ignorance, arrogance, dehumanization or mistreatment are recorded with a single stroke of the chisel,” says Cabellut, one of the most sought-after Spanish artists. Sexist violence, understood as both physical and possessive aggression against women, is one of the problems that has remained intact since the 19th century and that the painter highlights in The rapacious horse And Nonsense about marriage. The first represents a nag attacking a woman, and the second a female figure clinging to the back of a man.
Cabellut reinterprets them in his large format canvases, with a two-tone palette of black and white, signs of his identity. As is recurrent in his production, all the canvases are crossed by vertical lines which resemble drips of paint, in the manner of drainingbut these are cuts made with Japanese knives. “Forced marriage was common in Goya’s time, and Lita brings it back to today with the situation of fear and lack of freedom that women live, lives that end up being miserable because of the fear of relationships” , says the exhibition curator. exhibition, Eloy Martínez.
Unhappy and unhappy
The artist pursues the feminine links of yesterday and today with Poor stupidityin which six old women are depicted wearing large robes and headdresses covering their heads. “In this absurdity, Goya shows us three stages in the life of a woman: the one who refuses to accept her destiny, the one who assumes it and the one who finally goes mad,” explains Cabellut. The loss of basic feelings of empathy is another dilemma that the author believes has been perpetuated over time. In response, he created a triptych and a seated sculpture based on loyaltyin which several people make fun of a hairless and deformed beggar. Or in the A nonsense of exhortationin which he is interested in the different faces of a head which reflect “the worst and the best of ourselves”.
Cabellut, who has lived in The Hague (Netherlands) for more than four decades, became directly connected to Goya when he saw figures living in the streets in his paintings. The painter spent her childhood begging between La Boquería and Port Vell in Barcelona, where she grew up despite being born in Sariñena (Huesca). Daughter of a father she never knew and a mother who abandoned her, she entered an orphanage at the age of 10 and was adopted at 13. Visiting the Prado Museum with his new family, after seeing the works of the author of black paintsdecided he wanted to be an artist. “I had to live like him, see what was on the door next to my house, get involved in the neighborhood, find the expression of the muscle, which is what we are and represents us,” recalls -he.
These unfortunate people who are the main concern of Goya and Cabellut are represented in the exhibition through several sculptures of heads placed in attics. These are the distorted faces for which Goya entered history, even if the painter specifies: “she does not make distorted faces, she makes realistic faces. That’s what you see when you cross the face, you cross it. The exhibition ends with the only object present in the exhibition, a sort of spider’s web constructed with tarlatan, a textile with which the engravings have been cleaned since their existence until today. Another way to establish a relationship between past and present.
But all is not dark in the work of Goya and Cabellut. The creator, recently honored by the University of Barcelona, assures that these sordid paintings of the Aragonese are a necessity to see the light of day. “He left the testimony of the atrocities we experienced because he believed in humanity. THE Absurdity “They remind us that 200 years ago we had the same ego, but also the same strength and the same divinity.” A hope that the author wanted to reflect in a completely white painting which contrasts with the black backgrounds in which the parts of Absurdity.
Just before this piece, the engraving was published The stagnantwhere a group of people grouped together seem to protect themselves from an oppressive cold and an all-consuming darkness. “The white box is this way out, this hope devoid of animality and cruelty. “It represents faith in the human race to be able to give vital meaning to our existence.”
