About Bulls and Tauromaquias
This body of work explores the logic of violence through a revisitation of Goya’s Tauromaquias and other bull’s images.
While notable Spanish painters like Goya and Picasso have famously depicted the bull fight in their works, fascination with the subject goes beyond the popularity of a game that is emblematic of a national culture. The bull is a universal metaphor. When on display in the arena, the bull is exposed to everybody’s gaze, mockery and hate. His destiny is either to be killed or to provide humans with entertainment through his struggle to survive.
Who, in his or her life, has not felt at one time or another to be center of everybody’s gaze, mockery and hate, in the position of being a victim, a scapegoat.
In Goya’s Tauromaquias the bull is a victim, but is also often the winner. Goya seems to take the bull’s side. By depicting various bullfights scenes, Goya exposes the infantile and perverted enjoyment humans have in seeing others suffer, yet, at the same time, reveals their own internal suffering.
In both Goya’s etchings and in the reality of the corrida, the bull attacks indiscriminately reacting to a threat, and acts consequently. The bull is put in the position of being attacked for reasons he cannot understand and his random reaction is logical and justified. This depiction of a violent reaction seemed to me a good starting point as a metaphor to explore ethics of violence.
One side of this work is my being on the bull’s side, because he represents the victim, so I tend to depict him a a winner over human stupidity. But looking at these images, I could not help thinking of the randomness of terrorist attacks, where violence is applied indiscriminately, killing innocent victims, like a raging bull does. It feels like a crazy nonsense, an act of a lunatic. Yet the similarity of reactions brought me to think that only somebody feeling under the threat of his /her very existence could react , or plan to act in such a way.
Unlike a bull, a human being under a non immediate life threat, still has the possibility to apply ethical judgments, to direct and channel his or her reaction and response to a situation.
The question is that of what brings a person to give up an ethical position, at the core of a subject in relation to other subjects, in favor of an indiscriminate violent act aimed to kill anybody, and in doing so erasing the particularity of the other subjectivity but also his own?