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

The darkest, most macabre and modern Francisco de Goya is that of his engravings. Among them, the series Nonsense It is the most hermetic and the least is known about its creation process. Deformed, two-headed or carnival-like beings swarm throughout its 22 prints, exercising or suffering violence and facing a gloomy 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 do 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 of San Fernando.

“I feel the Nonsense 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. Egoism, brutality, ignorance, arrogance, dehumanization or mistreatment are recorded with the blow of a burin,” 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 have remained intact since the 19th century and that the painter highlights in The raptor horse and Marriage nonsense. The first represents a nag attacking a woman, and the second a female figure attached 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 that look like paint drips, in the style of the 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 subsequent lack of freedom that women live, lives that end up being miserable due to the fear of relationships,” argues the curator of the exhibition, Eloy Martínez.

Unfortunate and unhappy

The artist continues with the feminine connections of then and now with Poor nonsensein which six old women are represented dressed in large robes and headdresses covering their heads. “In this nonsense, 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 has finally gone mad,” explains Cabellut. The loss of basic feelings of empathy is another of the dilemmas that the author claims have been perpetuated over time. To echo this, he has made a triptych and a seated sculpture based on loyaltyin which several people mock a hairless and deformed beggar. Or in the Exhortation nonsensein 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 at 13 she was adopted. On a visit with his new family to the Prado Museum, after seeing the works of the author of the black paintsdecided he wanted to be an artist. “I had to live like he did, see what was in the doorway next to my house, get involved in the neighborhood, find the expression of the muscle, which is what we are and represents us,” he remembers.

Those unfortunate people who are the main concern of Goya and Cabellut are represented in the exhibition through several sculptures of heads arranged in attics. They are the deformed faces for which Goya went down in history, although the painter clarifies: “she does not make deformed faces, she makes realistic faces. This is what you see when you go through the face, you go through it.” The exhibition ends with the only object present in the exhibition, a type of spider web built with tarlatana, 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 not everything is darkness in the work of Goya and Cabellut. The creator, recently awarded Honoris Causa by the University of Barcelona, ​​assures that these sordid paintings by the Aragonese are a necessity to see the light. “He left testimony of the atrocities we experienced because he believed in humanity. The Nonsense “They remind us that 200 years ago we had the same egos, but also the same strength and divinity.” A hope that the author wanted to reflect in a totally white painting that contrasts with the black backgrounds in which the parts of Nonsense.

Just before that piece the engraving was posted The stagnantwhere a group of people grouped together seem to protect themselves from an overwhelming cold and a devouring darkness. “The white box is that way out, that hope devoid of animality and cruelty. “It represents faith in the human race to be able to give vital meaning to our existence.”