Caprichos IV

The sleep of reason produces monsters. The most famous plate in Goya's Caprichos depicts the artist lying asleep with his head on the desk while various visions and dreams of owls, bats, asses and giant cats swirl around him and above his head. The inscription accompanying the etching reads, "The artist dreaming. His only purpose is to banish harmful, vulgar beliefs and to perpetuate in this work of caprices the solid testimony of truth". Ambitions of modern artists also attempt to transform anxious thoughts and fearful premonitions concerning the conditions of humanity into images laden with suggestive conceits, without necessarily crystallizing their truths into obvious didactic forms.  Apprehension about contemporary political, societal, and personal encounters synthesizes the artists' pictorial elements into private codes of meaning, cryptic expressions of a encumbering neurosis, allowed to be scanned by outside viewers without exhausting their possible interpretations.

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Intimidations, conflicts, unsatisfied emotions twisted by relationships, narratives assembled from a theater of experiences, shown here through images suggesting the consequences of society and survival, of companionship and procreation. Pictures that sometimes portray the savage element of the human beast scratching for freedom from civilized behavior, encountering situations loaded with distrust and fraught with exploitation.  Here, too, are visual impressions of the phantoms of gender, friendship, and family, passionate and often self-destructive, caught up by mental adjustments necessary to partly indulge, yet also restrain, divided desires. In the final analysis, these are pictures, not unlike many of those appearing in "The Fallen," obsessed with depicting the stagnation of lives imprisoned within frustrations erected by their own disordered appetites.