Goya’s dreams haunt, like ghosts, certain artists who seek a radical root of modernity. That monstrosity arising from rationality is nothing other than the dialectic of enlightenment that, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, leads from Odysseus’ oarsmen who could not hear the deadly song of the Sirens to the barbarism perpetrated by National Socialism in Auschwitz. In 1982, Sigmar Polke, dressed in an imposing fur coat, planted his camera in front of ‘The Old Women’ (1810-12), by Goya, which is part of the collection of the Lille Museum. That work had been restored and it had been discovered that the Spanish painter recycled a canvas, painted by another’s hand, with a scene of the Resurrection of Christ. Related news standard No ART Miquel Navarro: “I don’t want to complicate my life with death” Javier Díaz-Guardiola standard Yes REVIEW BY: Gabriele Münter at the Thyssen Museum: The forgotten horsewoman of Expressionism Carlos Delgado MayordomoThe strata of that work, which also received the title ‘Time’, were an extraordinary ‘trigger’ for Polke, who once declared that to attract the public’s attention it was even legal to place explosives in the paintings. In 1963, accompanied by Richter, Lueg and Kuttner, Polke held an exhibition in Dusseldorf titled ‘Demonstration of Capitalist Realism’, in which they confronted Pop Art and, above all, questioned the dynamics of consumerism and the empire of the media. of mass communication. A work of his from that same year, with the provocative title of ‘The Sausage Eater’, sedimented his animosity against opulent society. For six decades, this German creator displayed an impressive work, stylistically casual in the style of Picabia, in which he resorted to enlarging newspaper photos, enjoying the distortions of the plot, the enlargement of the dots or , in other words, with the pulverization of the images. “Something more real” I felt that the image came more to life when there was some imperfection. He deformed to achieve “something more real”, generating new meanings. It was not, in any case, about proposing riddles or conclusive meanings, on the contrary, many of his paintings changed according to the climate and humidity, temperature and light, prodigies of chemical transformation or, as he liked, « alchemical processes” or that recall the power of magic. In a conversation with Bice Currige r carried out in 1984, Polke pointed out that there are no superpositions that last forever: “What is underneath cannot stay below. These superpositions reveal a very simple trick, that everything is in motion, also in the head. When does all this overlapping end? It doesn’t end at all! Never! It manifests itself as interferences and inaccuracies in perception. In the catalog of the exhibition at the Rotterdam Museum held in 1983, which included ‘Conjectural drawings on the background painting of Goya’s painting “The Old Women”‘, Polke recounts his singular telepathic contact with Goya: “But a One day Goya, the Lucent, came to me and said: “Quasuntarne/ quasuratun/ quasa tula.” […] I asked him “what’s up?”, to which he wanted to know how I knew that. I told him that I remembered that he had drawn a monkey, looking behind a mirror to see if… Then he lit all the candles on the brim of his hat and he was really illuminated. “Face to face. In the images, details of the montage of ‘Affinities revealed’ Prado MuseumThe artist is a medium or, in an Aristotelian key, an atrabiliary, capable of illuminating even while blinding. If a work of art has specular capacity, it may, like a drawing by Goya, made between 1797 and 1799, reflect a dandy like a monkey. Polke, as he said without complexes, liked his painting to be influenced by the art of the past, even following what is described as “an academic path.” He let the mutating surface of his paintings be the space for both carnivalization and the time of ‘apofrades’, the sixth of the revisionist quotients of ‘The Anguish of Influences’, by Harold Bloom. Polke photocopies fragments of the painting of the sinister old women, oblivious to the melancholy for the lost aura, assuming the reproductive excrescences, letting the toner sediment his ‘errors’. His masterful radicalization of what Baudrillard described as “the Xerox degree of culture” leads him to turn the painting into something deliberately lacking sharpness. He was not willing to agree with the Greenbergian dogma of ‘the flatness’ of painting and much less with the ideology of purity; With good reason, the Swedish poet Erik Dietman raised, as a tribute to Polke, the question of “where could the excrement of Goya’s dog be?” A cheeky wink In 1985, Polke and his partner, the historian Britta Zoellner, were in Madrid from from September to the end of October, making thirteen visits to the Prado Museum. It is not unusual that the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale the following year included a work that made explicit reference to Goya’s dog. Polke stated that a painting only becomes a painting when you also do your part: “In the case of changing paintings, you have to move yourself into it in order to flow with it.” Now, thanks to the magnificent exhibition curated by Gloria Moure at the Prado Museum, we can slowly contemplate those ‘Goyesque’ paintings by Polke that, as she recommended, should be “looked at quickly.” The solitary dog, with all the anguish it projects, is well accompanied by these works that also take up the ‘Colossus’, which was the object of regrettable disputes and which is still marked as ‘attributed’ to Goya. Polke is, paradoxically, a untimely man who arrives on time, like Cronos who wields a broom and who is going to end the ‘posturing’ in front of the mirror of the decrepit aristocrat and the repulsive pimp with the countenance of a skull. Acting like Max Ernst in his engravings from the series ‘Une semaine de bonté’, the sarcastic promoter of “capitalist realism” takes up what Moure describes as “the subversive aspect of modernity” that beats in Goya and turns the world upside down, making us see that, like in ‘Caprice number 26’, we don’t know where to settle down.Sigmar Polke ‘Affinities revealed’. Prado Museum. Madrid. Paseo del Prado, s/n. Commissioner: Gloria Moure. Until March 16, 2025What we are left with is the catastrophe or, to be more precise, that theory of dynamic folds and bifurcations. Polke speculates with the “what’s up?” of the old women’s mirror, which we can now contemplate for the first time in the Prado Museum, to try to “see things as they are”, that is, grotesque, strange or, returning to Cat Alley, grotesque. Strict inheritance of ‘Nonsense’.
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