Bull’s-Eye View

NoBull yet AVoidaBull

 

 

2004-2005

mixed technique 109x128x7 cm (LED internally lit)

Dedicated to Eugenia Duchess of Alba and to Francisco Goya

Bullfighting is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death and in which the degree of brilliance in the performance is left to the fighter’s honour.’

Ernest Hemingway

 Through the cut out silhouette of a bull's head, which is in the centre of a target - the bullseye - we see a replica of Edouard Manet’s ‘Md.lle Victorine Meurent in the Costume of an Espada’. Francisco Goya’s bull has been taken out of Manet’s picture and, though ‘absent’ (a void) is now in a time warp, charging Md.lle Victorine. (Manet was born in 1832, after Goya’s death in 1828.) Goya’s lover, Eugenia Duchess of Alba, liked to scandalize, not only by posing naked for her lover (la Maja desnuda), but also by appearing in public dressed up as a bullfighter. Therefore, the subtitle - NoBull yet AVoidaBull refers to the flamboyant Duchess: Can the Duchess avoid being gored by the bull or can the bull avoid tossing the Duchess?