Goya Reborn in Water: An Etched Dialogue Between Past and Present
Francisco de Goya (1746–1828), often hailed as the “last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns,” transformed printmaking through his mastery of etching and aquatint. Born in Fuendetodos, Aragon, Goya became court painter to Charles III and later Charles IV, yet it is his stark series Los Caprichos, The Disasters of War, La Tauromaquia and Los Disparates that immortalised his unflinching social commentary.
Working on copper plates, Goya scratched his lines through an acid-resistant ground before biting tonal washes via powdered resin in an acid bath, a technique known as aquatint, enabling painterly nuances of ink and wash in multiples. Encyclopedia Britannica, National Gallery of Art.
In “Plate 53 ¡Qué Pico de Oro!” from Los Caprichos, Goya satirises hollow rhetoric with a choir of gaping mouths focused on a hooting owl, emblem of folly. In “Plate 70 – Devota profesión,” skeletal demons obsess over doctrinal texts, each tonal field etched by the artist’s own hand.
In my reinterpretation, these iconic images are reframed: hovering beside the resigned figures is a single-use plastic Coca-Cola bottle. This anachronistic insertion is no novelty; it functions as contemporary social indictment, reframing Goya’s moral urgency for an era of corporate-induced ecological crisis.
My exhibition Goya Reborn in Water reprises the monastic rigour of early nineteenth-century print workshops. Figurative subjects in handmade garments are submerged in custom tanks of purified water; refracted light is sculpted by hand across the surface before analogue 8×10 film plates are processed and printed without digital intervention.
All materials — from garments to crucifixes — are handcrafted, echoing Goya’s devotion to manual process and moral intent. View the series.
Water, as stated in my 1987 manifesto, is “the new oil.” With over 1.6 billion plastic bottles produced daily worldwide — fewer than five percent ever down-cycled — single-use packaging pollution now rivals the disasters of war in its silent devastation.
Where Goya confronted Napoleonic brutality, these submerged plates confront the chemical violence inflicted upon oceans and bodies alike. The plastic bottle functions as a modern grotesque — as potent as Goya’s spectres — demanding ethical reckoning.
Installed at Castillo de la Piedra Bermeja, Brihuega, the works inhabit a thousand-year-old fortress reached through a cemetery, echoing the ritual passage from mortality to transformation present in both Goya’s work and my own.
Each analogue plate exists as a singular artefact of provenance, resisting mechanical reproduction. Pomona College, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By bridging historical technique with ecological urgency, Goya Reborn in Water stands as witness, indictment, and testament. These works ask us to heed memory and responsibility in equal measure.
A selection of these works is available from €22 via the Distil Ennui exhibition page. Printed true to the original plate size on museum-grade bamboo paper.
