88. FRANCISCO DE GOYA Y LUCIENTES: A SPACE BETWEEN FLIGHT AND FALL.

Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya, Holburne Museum - BATH.

Francisco de Goya Y Lucientes (1746-1828) A way of flying, plate 13 from The Follies (1815-24). c.1854. Etching, aquatint and possibly drypoint on paper. Trustees of the British Museum.

To etch an image grazed into a surface of burnished scratches.

to colour by hand - as to brush sugar washes in hues of a knowing childhood - threaten nightmares - sung as lullabys...

Bulls loom lightly - to glide as helium-filled or gravity-free within a constellation of freckled forgottens. Their feathered tails gentle - their eyes watchful.

Rego's giant cat and silhouetted fiddle pluck a night sky as a dog barks in silence and a saucer scuttles into a foliage of fools.

As a giant grimaces - as features sliced from a chalken cliff - beam brightly, moonlit glimmeringly against the inky darkness of the surrounding night. Impress a page, as a Torreadors' cape held forth in provocation, its drenched surface - gleaming within its sodden swathes. Such contrasts depicted through a mastery of monochrome choices - tenderly assertive within asymmetric compositions crafted to jarr.

Monsters lunk within the faces of the familiar, seen again as if in disguise, a herd of humans morph into one gloop - as a frogspawn swells - hatched from a spell. Lurking within the ghostly fog of the background of a drama - as if a distraction from a destined threat. Gossiped within a swirl of whispers. Goya's loyalty to such hazes - to the grey areas of the in-between - of the lingering uncertainty and taught atmospheres of change - remind of the impending - as within the exhausted confusion of a dreamscape where minutes stretch as the threads of ink awaiting commitment to page.

A merry folly of folk - spongeily squelch and sway within a ring - as a slither of offal squeaks - to glisten under starlight and to imagine colours of roots - pulled from the earth - oozing with the sodden - screaming from the severance. 

To pool - a slapping of splashes - to slither a stream - run a river to flow into an ocean of sweated fevers and sticky fears.

And then to breathe in the cool air of a higher realm - within that degrade of scattered stars - as to look down on that midnight ceremony where hacked plaster heads morph a madness.

As Rego's rosed rendition - a rotation of parts - giggles into the round as a drunken sway - holding hands with strangers - who blur the scene in view - with the choreographed abandon of Bausch - danced in the tightly laced shoes of Sundays.

A commune of the extracted - tethered in their body bagged cassocks, scissored heads as ravaged plumes - necks framed with the ruffs - drawn to choke as strings of a sack - as the countless forms stacked as sculptures in storage. This procession of chattering - forms a whole, as a foam of an inhuman seascape awaiting a return - to engulf and dissolve.

Uncanny Visions: Paula Rego and Francisco de Goya, Holburne Museum - BATH. Until 5 January 2025.