Few works of art have a history as rousing or enigmatic as Francisco Goya’s Black Paintings. The tale goes something like this: Goya, possibly very ill, bought an estate outside Madrid called the Quinta del Sordo (”villa of the deaf one”), named after a previous deaf tenant. Here, in a state of near madness and possibly going deaf himself, he painted his darkest (in both shade and content) works on the walls of the villa itself. He never named the paintings, and never intended them to be seen, yet several of these murals are among his most famous and lauded today. Perhaps the landscapes of Fight with Cudgels and the two Pilgrimages existed as murals in the villa before Goya’s arrival, and the addition of his cynical processions was merely Goya’s opprobrium on the banal works he saw every day. Perhaps Goya did not paint any of them at all.
The story has all the elements of art history catnip: the early l’art pour l’art of his unwillingness and inability to exhibit these works, the unknowable nature of his intentions, and a doubling down on the trope of the mad and brooding artist giving one last rebuke to the world that made him suffer. Multi-disciplinary artist Philippe Parreno has mostly divorced this half-dubious story from the works themselves in his La Quinta del Sordo, a video work that purports to simply show the paintings themselves in great detail. Of course, as the title itself hints, the story still seeps its way in.
Though the Black Paintings have been displayed in the Museo Nacional del Prado since the late 19th century, Parreno’s film appears to portray them as if they still don the walls of his quinta, demolished in 1909. Each shot is a close-up of faces and figures isolated from their context, and only a few times does the camera ever pull back to reveal an entire work. The grim mocking faces of one painting are suddenly cut to match the suffering of the face of another: perhaps it’s from the same painting, or perhaps it’s the painting across the room. To view each work in isolation is to deny the effect of seeing these figures adorning different parts of the room and thus to deny their neighborly visits with each other or their secret conversations. Parreno partially fixes this through his disorienting presentation, though his camera and his cuts allow the viewer only his narrative.
But even more trickery is afoot: these close-ups and pans across the paintings are presented without narration and are complemented only by a minimal soundtrack and effects from the imaginary villa itself. Several slow-motion sequences of flickering sparks break up the hypnosis of viewing the paintings for too long and provide the origin story of the film’s single light source — the small orange glow illuminating only fractions of the wall at any time. These crackling embers echo throughout the empty estate until they cease, and a soft blue morning light visits the wall instead. A rain starts, and the demons on the wall become subdued. Sometimes, even a prism breaks the light into soft, small rays of hope and color; perhaps this is Parreno’s counter-commentary to Goya’s cynicism. Though neither the sound nor light were created naturally, the illusion of Quinta del Sordo’s return is a marvel itself.
And yet, this is no mere exercise in historical recreation. Parreno actively reworks the paintings by changing the camera’s focal length at a close distance. Suddenly, a crowd of faces can disappear into a blur to reveal the goat-priest of the Witches’ Sabbath, or Saturn’s maw can dissolve into abstraction as a closer look reveals only glimmers of gold light shimmering off even this black paint. The one quality uniting all of the Black Paintings is a crude simplicity bordering on abstraction: many of the faces in his crowds have no eyes or mouths but instead simple stokes of shadow, forming a rough sense of pareidolia. By shifting the focal length to allow the light and paint textures to replace features, Parreno continues this process of abstraction through time. He holds one figure in this black halo only to reveal it as a surprise or joke or jump-scare. Goya’s isolated world of darkness has become cinematic.
Published as part of Doc Fortnight 2025 — Dispatch 1.
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