An iconic artist. Artist as he is or as he ever could be. Goya became an eye — through the window of his art — into the eternal complexity of human nature.
An iconic artist. Artist as he is or as he ever could be. Goya became an eye — through the window of his art — into the eternal complexity of human nature. In such terms, he is truly “natural.” It’s important to talk about Mr. Goya; as a Ukrainian, currently living in Canada, moved there from China, Guangzhou, in 2023, I simply can’t help myself reflecting on his outstanding (in-depth-taking?) oeuvre. His whole life and career — by his own will or by some kind of divine presence — was the hard unaffordable price he paid willingly to become an eternally observing starring eye of pure art. His art tells us innumerable stories his own and the time — and it always will.
I like talking with Goya. Since I first saw “The Third Of May 1808,” in some encyclopedia when I was a schoolboy or even younger. It was stunning. After that, I saw Goya’s “Los Caprichos” at an exhibition in the Kyiv Khanenko Museum, when I was a Kyiv Mohyla Academy history and culture bachelor and master’s student. I still believe that no one, after witnessing all that art, will come outside from the museum’s gate the same person as he/she entered it. Goya changes. The math of enormous fear and dramatic pathos can physically eat you up without even leaving bones. The moment you face Goya, you start to see within the Eye. His eye. The eye, which from then on, becomes your eye. Centuries before Dziga Vertov’s cinema eye, Goya already had it in his art. The art with true documentary force. Still a few dozen years before Louis Daguerre's invention (1839).
Goya is my soulmate. With his art, you don’t afraid you will lose yourself or won’t overcome some casual everyday life difficulties, job troubles, or unpaid credits. He proved the power of true art revelation and the miraculous reflection of a master. With mastery, and master’s position, comes colonial implications and colonial discourse itself. Goya created his masterpieces in the heart of the Spanish colonial empire, one of the biggest on the planet by that time, an empire, shaken by a powerful invasion from another’s, of Napoleon. In today’s terms, Goya is white, male, and European. He’s not an artist of color or from “underrepresented communities” (Jerry Saltz, “Art Is Life”). Today he would probably feel guilty for that, trying to work in disguise or undercover. At that time, 1820s, since the end of the XVIII century he was busy solving all-human-involving issues, like hatred, genocide, deepest fear, massacres, mass killings, etcetera. He showed himself as (one of the first ones) a really modern author addressing problems of the day and wildly contemporary even in 2023.
As Wikipedia reads, Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828). His life dates mean that he witnessed the triumph of so called Classicism and, after the age of Revolutions (Enlightenment?) flooded Europe (and, the rest of the colonized world), Romanticism. Both were inspired in Europe, with predominantly male and white artists. Intentionally, I won’t go linear and therefore well anticipated in this small sketch. Well. Let the eye decide.
Yard With Lunatics, circa 1794
Vibrant Baroque style kind of composition. With brilliant flexibility of swirling bodies (almost naked, half-naked). It has something from mysterious dark-light-patches of Caravaggio. On the crest of its unimaginable, unbearable dramatism, we still can’t be sure of why these dwarf human figures are wrestling, between casual family scenes and lunatic phantasmagoria. Normal artwork questions, like why, where, and when, — are not applicable here. We face the result of dehumanization, that already happened. Goya fixed it brilliantly, 32x43 cm, oil on tin-plated iron.
Saturn Devouring His Son, 1819-1823 (mixed technique, mural on the wall and canvas)
The depiction of fear itself. The fear of (probably) time eating up — each and single of us — human beings. Consequently, to be a human being automatically means, being afraid, to somehow overcome the fear of being eaten by time. Or, any other authoritarian dominant power. Goya's art, even in his deepest, darkest deaf hour, is about free will, freedom, and democracy. Through all the terrors of wars and nature, he resonates with the Hope and his art instinctively looking for it. It always finds.
Saturn’s eyes, which are about to fly out upon the viewer, his tyrant mouth, a half-eaten human figure that he holds in his hands... All deny any possibility of Hope. And, still, it lures from the Nothingness itself. When we have — even a crumble of — we can beat the alienation. Goya depicts Nothingness, Something of Hope always luring from the bottom of a crater of a volcano.
The Third Of May 1808 (oil on canvas, 266x345 cm, 1814)
Even before the battle of Waterloo, in 1815, Goya already defeated Napoleon’s power by the power of his art. White-winged bird of pure linen (I suppose, I have just online access to the painting) shirt of the Spaniard cursing the shooting French inquisitors. Marauding “thin” line of grey-coated bayonets. They are shooting. Goya got the moment. In the prime conflict of eyes clinging from different directions, the artist’s (and therefore, ours) sympathies belong to the protagonists of unarmed resistance. They are free from any fears, they are desperate. Same as Theodore Gericault’s “The Raft Of The Medusa” (1819), a few years after Goya (again, a tribute to Jerry Saltz). The unshaken triumph of processing Death, the disparity of Nothingness (what can be more of Nothing, than that?) ... unexpectedly, open up — a clear and, again, unshakable triumphant way for the Hope. Hope is evident preeminently in the rebellious leader's white linen spot on the shirt and the lucid spot on the wall against which the rebels are about to be executed. The execution is the moment of Hope and posthumous Glory. Glory to Heroes. (True art is which gives us, human beings, Hope in a time of mass murders and genocide executions.)
According to Goya himself, his three primary influences are: nature, Rembrandt and Velasquez.
