A partir d’un seul tableau de Goya

The purpose will be to tell the story of the exclusive relationship I have with Goya’s painting entitled The Family of the Infante Don Luis (1784), which is kept at the Villa Magnani-Rocca near Parma. An early work by Goya, this painting is a group portrait in which 14 characters, including the painter himself who has depicted himself at work, stand out against the night. Lit by a torchlight during a show that was taking place in the Villa and for which I had written the text, this early painting by Goya began to haunt me. To the point that I considered, beyond what I said about it in the show, to engage in an in-depth investigation into what is mysterious about it and into the knot of destinies that it condenses, starting from a nocturnal vision in which the terror, so characteristic of the painter’s future work, is still only a tremor. The project of this exploration has been with me for years and I will also try to understand why I delay it endlessly, as if it were a question of suspending the power of resonance of the painting, taken here as the very example of what an image can conceal.

Jean-Christophe Bailly is a writer. For a long time, he directed the Détroits collection (published by Christian Bourgois) and an art history collection (published by Hazan). He has also worked in theater, both as an author and as a maker, among other places abroad (India, Russia, Italy). J.C. Bailly has published some twenty books, at the crossroads of history, art history, philosophy and poetry: Le versant animal (published by Bayard, 2007), L’Atelier infini (published by Hazan, 2007), L’Instant et son ombre (published by Seuil, 2008), Le Dépaysement (published by Seuil, 2011), Le Parti pris des animaux and La Phrase urbaine (published by Seuil, 2013). He is the author of monographs on contemporary artists and, recently, of an essay on the portraits of Fayoum.