El Gran Cabrón
Spanish nightmares... and an ever-deeper descent into the ghoulish world of Francisco de Goya
The night before I went to see Goya’s “Black Paintings”, I walked on my own to the ancient alcazaba above Trujillo. There was a hum of insects and pollen in the air; the smell of wildflowers and nightbirds calling in the warm, North African breeze. About a mile away from the castle walls, somebody was burning brash from a cleaned-out corkwood. The smell rode back and forth across the gloom in the eddies.
I was thinking about the vultures I’d seen on the cliffs of the Portuguese border and the terrifying shape of a 3,000 year-old shaman painted on the bare-faced rocks.
I was thinking about the storks in the town and the headache-recoil of bright sun and sudden shade in the walk beneath Moorish cloisters.
I was thinking about skulls I’d seen embroidered into medieval shrouds and the clapped out, distant shape of a bell-tower in the sunset.
During the course of my stay, I’d seen enough to know that Spain is not a joke. It’s to be taken very seriously - because here is the point of origin, and the paintpot from which all the world’s lighter washes are drawn. And the next day, I was destroyed by those cleanly presented rooms in Madrid where even after two centuries, restorations of Goya’s work are still so disturbingly confrontational that some people refuse to visit them.
Overwhelmed by rising surges of instability, Francisco de Goya y Lucientes spent his final years in silence. A sudden illness left him profoundly and entirely deaf - the pressures and anxieties of his sensuous existence magnified and resounded upon themselves to the point of madness. You don’t have to lose yourself in the pedantic minutiae of art history to respond to the work of Goya – it’s a recurring point of frustration in my understanding of art that academics have shrouded this man in cloaks of complexity and confusion. They’ve made it seem like he’s making some specific point that only specialists can understand - but I can never sufficiently restate and overemphasise my belief that Goya is for everybody, and that in the final, terrifying brushstrokes of the failing artist’s life, he was making work that is not for silky academics or dome-headed drones - he was making work for you and me.
I sometimes feel like a pretentious arse for plunging so deeply into nineteenth century Spanish art and attempting to write about why it appeals to me, but I blame the specialists for this too. I have no axe to grind or point of hauteur to prove in myself – and I resent being made to feel ashamed of myself for trying to explain that there is something enormous here; something so fascinating and universal in this work which goes far beyond the weary snooze-mongery of formalised text-book education.
Between 1819 and 1823, Goya painted enormous murals directly onto the plaster of his house at Quinta del Sordo (house of the deaf man). Nobody knows why he did it, and it’s hard to be sure what he meant by these mad acts of creativity – but it doesn’t matter, because these paintings are more than enough in their disembodied ambiguity. Don’t worry about understanding them – just respond to them… and nurture the feelings of horror and disturbance which crowd around your peripheries. If there’s a place in your heart for disquiet and the prickle of unease, Goya has something to tell you – and it’s a damn sight more frightening and persistent than any horror movie you’ve ever seen.
You’ll have seen some of these “Black Paintings” here and there – they’re famous, and maybe descriptions will ring a bell:
· Saturno devorando a su hijo: As naked, wild-haired Saturn devours his tiny homunculus son, he stares directly out at the viewer with an expression of wide-eyed panic. He cannot stop himself – he’s more outraged than we are; both actor and audience are presented with the same futile question – “how can this horror be happening?”
· Dos viejos comiendo sopa: Two old people are hunched over their bowl of soup, their faces obscenely contorted by cynicism and self-interest. One is already dead; his lightless eyes are just the rendition of a skull in supplication. The other has broken from the act of eating to look at something off to his right with an expression of cackling, toothless malevolence.
· El perro: The little grey dog which swims through the tan-brown swell of a rising wave understands that he’s going to drown. He looks ahead of himself with an expression of shattered exhaustion. He is tiny in a hugeness of cold, unfeeling space.
But just as you never know what will strike you and when, the most violent impression came from the enormous display of a painting called El Gran Cabrón – the great billygoat. In it, we see the backlit silhouette of an enormous, demonic goat who is overseeing some kind of weird, unearthly rite before a coven of assembled witches. They’re lit by a low dimness of light which frightens the shadows under their eyes and around their noses – and every assembled witch is in some exaggerated state of outrage, collapse or despair. Their uglinesses are merged with animal features; some are stupid and gawking with bare feet exposed to the light; others are smeared into masks where deeply inset eyes peek out from the chilly gloom.
The painting is huge - it’s fifteen feet wide and five feet tall - it can swallow you whole, but at close quarters, some of these faces are smudged into place with a thumby nudge of paint – in this ambiguity, aren’t there also skulls and dogs and demon-skins draped between the stooping, clumsy witches? Stand back from this image and the figures appear neat and delicately rendered as a photograph – but close to, they’re nightmarishly abstract, and foully chilling beside it. Beside the goat, a little person has their back to us - they’re smiling into the crowd. Dwarves run all the way through Spanish art from Velazquez to Zuloaga, and here’s one of Goya’s – I’ve never found a satisfactory explanation for why it’s such a recurrent motif, but this individual is more than just the archetype of el enano – it’s a symbolic and deliberate distortion which makes my skin crawl.
In February, I went to an exhibition of Goya’s paintings in Italy. That was a useful grounding, but it was hamstrung by location. Goya’s work contains such an enormous amount of Spain - it feeds upon its native context until the two are blurred together and it makes no sense to search for the man in Milan. We can learn lots about Goya online and we can admire his paintings from afar - they certainly work in isolation, and there’s no way I would have spent this amount of time and effort pursuing the man if I hadn’t first been struck by a picture in a book. But then I placed myself at the mercy of these famously disturbing paintings after a week spent exploring the ancient depths of Extremadura - they made fresh and deeper sense in shockingly unexpected ways.
Goya’s dreamscapes have a foot in both fantasy and reality. They beckon to the simplest enquiry, but when you run towards them, they move back as if they’re bound to maintain a watchful distance. With the dust of Extremadura still crumbling in my boots, I looked at El Gran Cabrón and smelled the wick burning in its lantern; I could hear the cicadas whining and the overhead crackle of bats; the African scent of thorns and rain that hasn’t come yet. I was amongst those women, and every hair on my body stood on its end in horror.
Chasing Goya, I have run a long way down a line of research into his work – but the original mysteries endure, and most of the progress I’ve made on this pursuit has actually been far away from galleries and museums. If you can find a way to root your engagement with these paintings in the actual substance of this country, they’ll thicken around you like nightmares. They’re real after all, and the effect deepens until there’s little space for anything else in your mind when you turn out the bedside light.