In 1819, deaf, old and ill, Francisco Goya moved into a house known as the Quinta del Sordo, or House of the Deaf Man, on the southern outskirts of Madrid. Removing himself from the proximity of the royal court and the political turmoil of the city, he lived here for the next four years, principally working on preparatory drawings for his ongoing series of etchings, Los disparates, or Follies, and on the cycle of murals whose 14 images have come to be known as the Black Paintings. Using oils, he painted directly on to the plaster walls, covering over a number of landscapes that already decorated them, suggesting that the images he created there were made only for himself. Neither they nor his last great series of etchings, and their accompanying drawings, emerged until some years after his death, in exile in Bordeaux in 1828.
Two hundred years later, the Black Paintings remain by turns nightmarish, bitter, funny and tender. They come across as wounded, both as images and as objects. They have suffered a lot. Goya’s paintings were eventually cut from the walls (some say “hacked”, though the technique used to remove and conserve them was a skilled task) and transferred on to canvas in the mid-19th century. Paint was damaged or lost, and at least one was cut down in size.
Among the most enigmatic works of his turbulent life, they now occupy a single room at Madrid’s Prado museum, whose collection they entered in 1881. Why Goya painted them, and even if they were all originally painted by the artist himself; how much he revised and changed them, and how much they were further altered by early restorers – all that remains a matter of debate. There is also conjecture about his house (which got its name not from Goya, but from the previous occupant), which was demolished in 1909.
A few steps away from the Black Paintings takes us 200 years into the future, to a room of similar proportions, temporarily converted into a small cinema by the French artist Philippe Parreno, where he is showing La Quinta del Sordo, a film first seen at a Goya exhibition in Switzerland last year. Now it is paired with the paintings that provide its subject. Typically of this complex artist, there is more to it. Several times a day, the lights go down and a cellist takes a seat beside the screen, reading a statement by Spanish composer Juan Manuel Artero before beginning to play.
“Preludes, as we know, are like a time machine,” he reads, before playing a short solo composed by Artero. “They present something that has not yet happened.” When Parreno’s 40-minute film is over, the cellist takes up his bow a second time to play a sonata by Luigi Boccherini, an 18th-century Italian composer who had a place at the court in Madrid, and who had once been a friend of Goya’s. The prelude played before the film begins is itself a variation on Boccherini. The music is, Artero says, a time machine and a mirror, like the film.
Parreno’s film oscillates between surface and depth, light and shadow; between sound and vision, the pictorial spaces Goya created and the walls of the rooms they originally covered. This oscillation continues, like a tilting gyroscope, between past and present. At the end of the film, we see a crossroads at dusk, street lights, a row of buildings. We hear the traffic and the screeching brakes of a local train taking a bend in the track.
Parreno calls his film “science fiction”. This may seem contentious, until we learn about the 3D computer model he created of the house, which included the placement of the paintings in relation to windows and doors and to one another. Parreno was then able to make an acoustic model to simulate the way sound travelled through the building, the creak of its doors, footfalls on the wood floors, light and birdsong coming in through its windows. It is a kind of speculative architecture, a ghost space.
His film also employed a camera capable of shooting the Prado’s own high-definition scans of Goya’s images at half a million frames per second; this seems to generate a hiss, as if coming from the paintings themselves. There are further tilts and gyrations, between the paintings and our apprehension of them and the rooms they once inhabited, and the space inside a deaf man’s head.
How daylight fell and crossed the paintings, how shadows and murk and candlelight illuminated and obscured them as he moved about. How we saw, going from surface to depth as the fitful light raked their surfaces. How sound came and went, was heard and not heard, or how it reached Goya or was lost to the pounding in his ears and the interior squeaks and muffles in his head. The film makes us think how hearing affects sight, and how apprehending things is dependent on all our senses.
Everything rests on circumstance, the times of day, the months, the seasons and the weather. For all the research, working with documents in the Prado and other material, La Quinta del Sordo cannot be anything other than impressionistic. It approaches realism, but is constantly thwarted by detail, atmosphere, the volatility of its subject. The camera roves, catching Saturn’s boggling eyes as he gorges on his child. It dwells on gawping mouths, someone shouting in the ear of an old man, a hand holding scissors and an elderly couple eating. The crowds walking out of the city in the festival of San Isidro, Madrid’s patron saint; a couple of men trying to beat each other to death with cudgels. There are people sitting on branches and others floating in the air, all seen fleetingly, incompletely, as the camera goes from face to face, detail to detail, hand to ear, just like a wandering eye, homing in and sliding away.
The Black Paintings are filled with apparitions, classical references, with eating and anti-clerical rants, folkloric superstition and memory. Daylight through the window casts the shadows of leaves on the woman in the mantilla. The painting is incomplete and a bit of a ruin, but somehow alive, accompanied by the sound of pigeons and sparrows. Children’s squabbling voices leak in, parents calling, a church bell. Everyday sounds and a subliminal choir, thunder and deep encroaching rumbles at the witches’ sabbath.
This could be cheesy, but it isn’t. Parreno’s frequent collaborator, Nicolas Becker, won an Oscar for his sound design for the movie Sound of Metal, about a heavy metal musician losing his hearing. Becker helped Parreno map the acoustics of the Quinta. His aural re-creation of the house is marvellous. We listen on headphones, and sometimes feel pressure in our ears, the roar of circulating blood. This is almost a film about deafness, with its ringing interior noise, as well as the pictorial noise of the paintings themselves.
Watching Parreno’s film is like moving around an unfamiliar space with a candle. The dark sometimes assumes a galactic hugeness, lit by pulsing motes and clouds of ochre-ish dust, a flight of insects and light catching the camera lens, like spectral moons, by sparks and hisses, squeaks and squeals, and ominous vague shapes that won’t resolve. We only ever see things incompletely, which is how Goya’s paintings also appear to us now. There’s rain pattering at the window, the shadow of droplets sliding down the pane projected on to the heavy, overpainted emptiness above Goya’s dog. Did its owner once stand there, but was painted out? Afterwards, returning to the Black Paintings, I’m more alert to their every touch, to their silences and indeterminacy and strangeness, their hauntedness.
Until 4 September at the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid.
