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Goya, skinning babies - Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy
Reviews

From: Roxy Walsh
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 08 March 2001

Review

The hanging of this show is apalling. Who needs two little paintings dangling under a colossus; scruffy screens, incessant alarm buzzing, bad lighting... But it's good to see this number of Goyas outside of the Prado, not thinking of all the rooms and rooms to come of Velazquez, Titian, more Goya. Good to concentrate on this deformed puppet frozen in the air, the image of a donkey in an etched blanket (is it left over from a previous etching? is it the shroud of a donkey? the blanket of an Ass?) These paintings are some uncanny photographs.. had Goya a photographic memory before the invention of photography (and what would that be called).. how could you imagine the moment of a snapshot before such things existed? It's in the blurry events in the background of the etchings, it's sometimes in the framing, but mostly it's in the moistness of the lips of the fumbling man, bending right in the centre of the family portrait. And the sense of the soul manifest in the body, of thought made flesh, feeling meat. As in Ovid, the morphing cannot be but latent. As with the blush, meaning may not be transparent, but neither is it optional.

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