The Naked Mara

Never has the irate personality and the very public comodification of insanity and the catatonic de rigueur that dwells within madness been articulated in a more terrifyingly blunt, brutally visceral, scathingly wrenching, hauntingly isolated and privately agonizing manner as in my personal favourite Francisco Goya’s 'Saturn Devouring His Son', 'Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)' from the Black Paintings, ‘Witches’ Flight’ and in the 'Yard with Lunatics' (in the order of presentation below), all painted from the interior while in a frenzied fever dream of a very private purgatory. 

Saturn Devouring His Son

Note the limpid, gaping and bulging orifices of an agitated and exuberant Saturn, engulfed in the piety of an almost necrotic darkness which poses his pitiful plight with a somnolent aura, as he holds his son’s vertebrae in a vice like grip almost like breaking bread in half in this cannibalistic painting (first in the present order) done on a wall, while the second painting also done on a wall, with Satan and a coven of witches in a disarrayed pentagram exuding a sense of disorientation is in actuality the artist’s liberal tendencies railing against the conventions of then Spain with parallels that can be seen later echoed in Salem and in McCarthyism. 

Witches' Sabbath (The Great He-Goat)

Witches’ Flight

Yard with Lunatics

The final painting, well it is the wracking sweat of a nightmare, with the calisthenics of despair in a visual mutiny of a very acute and palpable spasm of fear. In our darkest hour.

- Ruwan Jayakody