A heroic feat! With dead men! is one of the most harrowing etchings from Goya’s The Disasters of War (1810-1820). Its naked fighters, hacked up and left hanging on a blasted tree, are a nightmare loosed from the war that beset Spain in the early 19th century. When the American sculptor Matthew Day Jackson was gifted it by a friend 11 years ago, Goya’s brutal vision fed into prints where gnarly branches snake across an apocalyptic sky, scored with the diamond patterns of the utopian architect Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes. “The Disasters of War is so important to learning about printmaking; it’s elemental in a sense, or like gravity,” he reflects. Since that early work, however, the print has become an important, more general touchstone for Jackson’s political, ecological thinking. Though he has typically focused on America, the big country marked by pioneering dreams and blood, it’s something he’s exploring on his current residency at Hauser & Wirth Somerset. “In Goya’s image, I see the figures and the tree as being one form. They’re representative of how we see parts of ourselves reflected in our natural environment.” In this sense, recent bronze sculptures where reclining nudes are composed from broken branches chime with Goya’s twisted blend of flesh and wood. “This image speaks to me outside of a war narrative, and fits within traditions of landscape and figuration that I have been investigating for years,” he says.“It’s also a reminder of how we need to be engaged with our current moment. No matter how oppressive the environment, progress and the traces we leave behind as proof of the good in our humanity cannot be obliterated.”
On Art 2018
Living Artists & Old Masters: Matthew Day Jackson
Matthew Day Jackson is inspired by the genius of Goya—just wait a few hundred years, and he will be an Old Master himself.