Lita Cabellut returns to Goya’s ‘Disparates’ to warn that violent and sordid society has not changed in 200 years

2024-10-29 13:49:00

The darkest, most macabre and modern Francisco de Goya is that of his engravings. Among these, the series Disparate It is the most hermetic and the least is known about its creation process. Deformed, two-headed or carnivalesque beings swarm in his 22 prints, exercising or suffering violence and facing 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) has chosen these impressions of what she considers her first teacher to make a reading of the 35 works on display Goya x Lita Cabellut. The nonsenseopen from 30 October to 26 January at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando.

Eve Babitz, the author admired by Joan Didion who wrote about the pleasures and dangers of 1970s Los Angeles

“I feel that Disparate as the most primitivist, disruptive and radical creations of Goya’s work, but at the same time I understand them as the most contemporary narratives that best reflect the shortcomings of today’s society. “Selfishness, brutality, ignorance, arrogance, dehumanization or mistreatment are registered with the blow of a burin,” says Cabellut, one of Spain’s most sought-after artists. Sexist violence, understood both as physical and possessive aggression against women, is one of the problems that has remained intact since the 19th century and which the painter highlights in The rapacious horse Yes Disparate double rooms. The first represents a nag attacking a woman, the second a female figure attached to a man’s back.

Cabellut reinterprets them in his large-format canvases, with a two-tone palette of black and white, signs of his identity. As is recurring in his production, all the canvases are crossed by vertical lines that look like drops of paint, in the style of drippingbut they are cuts made with Japanese knives. “Forced marriage was common in Goya’s time, and Lita brings it to the present day with the situation of fear and consequent lack of freedom that women live, lives that end up being unhappy due to the fear of relationships,” says curator of the exhibition. exhibition, Eloy Martínez.

Unlucky and unhappy

The artist continues with female connections then and now Poor nonsensein which six elderly women are represented dressed in large robes and headdresses that cover their heads. “With this nonsense, Goya shows us three phases in a woman’s life: the one who refuses to accept her fate, the one who takes it on and the one who ultimately goes mad,” explains Cabellut. The loss of fundamental feelings of empathy is another of the dilemmas that, according to the author, have perpetuated over time. To echo this, he made a triptych and a seated sculpture based on it loyaltyin which several people mock a hairless and deformed beggar. Or in Nonsense exhortationin which he focuses on the various faces of a head that reflect “the worst and the best of ourselves”.

Cabellut, who has lived in The Hague (Netherlands) for more than four decades, connected directly with Goya when he saw characters living on 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 with his new family at the Prado Museum, after seeing the works of the author of black paintshe decided he wanted to become an artist. “I had to live like him, see what was next door to my house, get involved in the neighborhood, find the expression of our muscles, which is who we are and represents us,” he recalls.

Those unfortunates who constitute the main concern of Goya and Cabellut are represented in the exhibition through several sculptures of heads arranged in the attics. They are the deformed faces for which Goya went down in history, even if the painter clarifies: “you don’t make deformed faces, you make realistic faces. This is what you see when you cross the face, cross it. The exhibition itinerary ends with the only object present in the exhibition, a kind of spider web built with tarlatana, a fabric with which the engravings have been cleaned from their existence until today. Another way to establish a relationship between past and present.

But not all is darkness in the work of Goya and Cabellut. The author, recently awarded the Honoris Causa award from the University of Barcelona, ​​assures that these sordid paintings of the Aragonese are a necessity to see the light. “He left testimony to the atrocities we experienced because he believed in humanity. THE Disparate “They remind us that 200 years ago we had the same ego, but also the same strength and divinity.” A hope that the author wanted to reflect in a completely white painting that contrasts with the black backgrounds in which the parts are depicted Disparate.

The recording was published shortly before that piece The stagnantwhere a group of people grouped together seem to protect themselves from an oppressive cold and a devouring darkness. “The white box is that way out, that hope free of animality and cruelty. “It represents faith in mankind to be able to give vital meaning to our existence.”