‘Goya after the curtain’

Goya’s Caprichos and drawings are full of fops, girls and old women who show off or look at themselves in the mirror. In our time, that place of personal exhibition is no longer the avenues, but Instagram. In Cecilia de Val’s “selfies,” the image is degraded, diluted, as in all the images that the artist has been handling, who, rather than manipulating them, is a witness to their immolation, inviting us to accompany her to see how the photos slip from her hands, or rather from her sight. A “crisis” of the image, an image of the crisis of these times, says Cecilia de Val, with a parallel, two hundred and twenty years ago, in a crisis that was perhaps even greater than ours, when the images of power unmasked themselves, and in a collective suicide, were transferred to that deposit of detritus that is the museum. Goya, however, will be the artist who continues to cause discomfort in the museum.