LITA CABELLUT IN DIALOGUE WITH GOYA
Goya's Los Disparates preceded, or marked, painting's entry into modernity. Beyond this historiographical note, the series by the Aragonese master captures with masterful imagery the vicissitudes of irony, sarcasm and the darkness of a reality that has lasted through time to the present day. The plates of his etchings become the surface that deposits this reality, and the result, once impregnated, works as a full reminder of the origin of our essence, our fears and our actions.
Goya x Lita Cabellut. Los Disparates, a title that is accompanied by the subtitle ‘Mísera humanidad, la culpa es tuya’, shows at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando how the essence of Goya's Disparates traces the strength and expressive reinterpretation of the ad-hoc production of Lisa Cabellut (Sariñena, Spain, 1961), who uses it as a conceptual origin to delve into the cultural, social and psychological gaze contained in it.
The exhibition presents a necessary dialogue between the atavistic and the original and its contemporary representation, despite the fact that Cabellut's work reaffirms in its result, but not in its technique, that Goya's production was not so far removed from the later evolutions attributed to pictorial practice. The works born of this conversation present an extreme force, a manifestation of palpable surrealism, contained and recognisable, as real as the feelings they convey, and which stand as pictorial and sculptural reinterpretations of the same fears, of the same existence, diminishing the anachronisms to the point of bringing them up to date.
But, beyond the final aesthetics, this exhibition is a profound approach of a scholarly nature, although more stimulating from the intellectual side and of understanding than from academicism itself. The route perfectly arranges the outline of this dialogue, of the veracity of two parts that create flows of a conceptual nature to consolidate this much-needed interlocution and which consolidates, in part, the artist's debt to the artist who has always been one of her great references.
Perhaps this praxis was essential for Cabellut, to develop that more intimate encounter that could provide a much more intense vision in aesthetic and artistic terms, but above all in that strength that the artist from Huesca always emphasises, the same one that points out that no support can still withstand that of Goya. Nevertheless, the difficulty of unravelling any underlying coherence in Los Disparates urges the artist to make a retrospective and introspective analysis, an element that undoubtedly becomes a current of energy that is as instrumental as it is exhaustive in her proposal.
The semantics of the two names and the inevitable trace of the temporal exalt a complex but tremendously aesthetic result, and we come to understand that Cabellut's subjective channelling of the master ends up producing an expressive convergence that addresses, from different but complementary codes, the always complex idiosyncrasy of ‘us’ and all the manifestations that we give off.
Goya x Lita Cabellut. Los Disparates can be seen until 26 January 2025 at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Alcalá, 13, Madrid (Spain).
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