the times | Monday June 13 2022 33
Wo r l d
When Goya painted his nightmarish
Black Paintings directly on to the walls
of his country retreat near Madrid he
never intended them for public display.
An exhibition by Philippe Parreno,
the French artist, has recreated the
alarming experience of first viewing
them inside the farmhouse, demolished
long ago. The Black Paintings are
among the most disturbing and price-
less works of art housed by the Prado
Museum in Madrid.
Parreno rose to international ac-
claim with a portrait of Zinedine
Zidane, the French footballer, using
multiple high-definition cameras
trained on him during a match with
Real Madrid. The Parisian artist said he
was never satisfied with the way the
remains are extracts, which of course
are splendid. So we rebuilt the entire
house in three dimensions in order to
have an acoustic print of the space.”
Parreno said they knew “exactly”Fresh light cast on Goya’s Black Paintings
Spain
David Sharrock Madrid
Prado displayed Goya’s 14 paintings, de-
picting Saturn devouring his son, a
witches’ coven presided over by the
Devil and a dog drowning in quicksand.
The museum has given Parreno’s
audio-visual reconstruction of la
Quinta del Sordo (the Deaf Man’s Villa)
the room adjoining the Black Paintings
so that visitors can deepen their experi-
ence of viewing Goya’s journey into his
private world of terror.
Parreno said he made the 40-minute
film with the same crew that worked
with him in 2005 to film Zidane, using
17 synchronised cameras.
“We spent time in the Prado before
going to film Zizou [Zidane’s nickname]
and that gave me the idea to go back one
day and try to recreate something that
was lost — a lost space,” he said. “The
house where Goya painted these paint-
ings is gone and forgotten and all thatwhere the paintings had been from the
archives of the Prado and other records.
“We knew the reflections of the
fireplace and the windows, the reflec-
tion of the curtains on certain paint-
ings,” he said.
The house was left desolate by Goya’s
grandson, to whom the estate was be-
queathed. The Black Paintings were
rescued in a bankruptcy sale by a
French nobleman who recognised their
importance and had them cut from the
walls and fitted on to canvases.
Their meaning remains hidden but at
the time of their creation between 1819
and 1823 Goya, the royal court painter,
was in his seventies, deaf and infirm,
plotting his escape from a country that
had slipped back into absolutism after
the promise of a revolution.
Parreno spent two nights alone with
the Black Paintings, filming them withultra-high-speed cameras millimetres
from their surfaces and lighting them
with candle effects to recreate how they
would have appeared in the early 19th
century.
He describes the sound extracted
from scanning the pictures as “like the
needle of a record player going through
a vinyl record”.
The experience is as unsettling as
standing in front of the Black Paintings,
only feet away but with an added im-
mersive dimension. The mystery re-
mains of what haunted Goya and
prompted him to create these intimate
nightmares. But Parreno has a theory.
“He was making these paintings at
the time that Mary Shelley wrote
Frankenstein,” he said. “There is a beau-
tiful link between the Black Paintings
and her novel — what do we do with
myths when they start to become real?”A woman leans on a burial mound in
one of the Black Paintings by GoyaHot spot Lava flowing down the southeast crater of Etna in Sicily on Saturday. Europe’s highest and most active volcano often erupts but rarely causes damageCall to keep
Paris pony
ride providers
on tight rein
France
Adam Sage Paris
Pony rides could disappear from Paris’s
parks after the city’s council said opera-
tors were failing to respect an animal
welfare charter.
It has given the three companies that
offer pony rides in the capital until
Wednesday to present their case. If
they fail to convince officials they face
fines of €500 a day or closure.
The National Equestrian Associa-
tion has claimed that the local author-
ity is bowing to pressure from a “vocal
minority” of activists.
Ponies are a feature of parks such as
Montsouris in the south of Paris or
Monceau in the north. Animaponey,
one of the operators, which has 70
ponies, charges €8.50 for a ride and
accepts children over the age of 15
months and who weigh less than 30kg.
However, the operators have been
criticised by Paris Animaux Zoopolis
(PAZ), an animal welfare association,
which said children were being “taught
that you can buy a pony ride like you
can buy a ride on a roundabout”.
It also claimed that the ponies were
deprived of hay, water and rest while at
work and were forced to carry children
who were too heavy for them.
The criticism prompted the council
to introduce a charter of good practice
in February, stipulating that ponies
should not work more than two days in
a row or more than 150 days a year, and
should be given a 10-minute break after
each 15-minute ride. It also said hay and
fresh water should be provided in the
parks at all times, and the animals
should be seen by a vet regularly.
PAZ claimed this week that the oper-
ators were failing to respect the charter,
an accusation backed by the council.
The National Equestrian Associa-
tion denied the claims, although it con-
ceded that access to hay was a problem
that was “being resolved”.
It said the ride operators were con-
cerned for the wellbeing of the ponies,
which are kept in stables in the country-
side and brought into Paris to work.
“With 77 per cent of the French popu-
lation being urban, people are cut off
from their rural roots,” the association
said. “The pony rides constitute one of
the last contacts that young city-dwell-
ers have with big animals.”
ANTONIO PARRINELLO/REUTERSRomans urge Unesco to help clean up city streets
Rome’s refuse collection and transport
unions have been blamed after res-
idents appealed to Unesco to intervene
and improve public services.
Dozens of writers, academics and
activists living in the historic city centre
wrote to urge the UN heritage body to
put pressure on the city’s mayor to clear
piles of uncollected rubbish, cut down
weeds and repair shoddy services.
Roberto Gualtieri has promised to
hire 655 refuse collectors but a senior
politician has claimed that understaff-
ing is not the problem. Carlo Calenda,
an MEP and head of the centrist Action
party, said union officials were covering
up for mass absenteeism and low work
rates while conniving with politiciansto support them. “In Rome the unions
are in total control of the city-owned
rubbish and transport firms,” he said.
Calenda, 49, stood for mayor last year
but lost to Gualtieri, 55, a former fin-
ance minister with the centre-left
Democratic Party. He said the unions
had blocked plans to install GPS on
rubbish lorries to ensure that they were
doing their jobs.
“Every time an employee is threaten-
ed with the sack for using a false sick
note, the unions defend them,” he said.
About 15 per cent of the more than
7,000 workers at the municipal rubbish
company are absent every day, either
off sick or claiming time off to care for
an ailing relative.
More than 1,500 staff who do show up
have medical certificates allowing
them to stay in the office, often becauseof back ache, meaning that they never
have to lift a bin. There are signs that
Gualtieri is taking action. The Rome
daily La Repubblica said that 200 staff
had declared themselves “miraculously
healed” last week after the company
ordered medical checks.
Rome’s lack of a rubbish incinerator,
its ageing lorry fleet and a history of bad
management are also to blame for the
piles of rubbish that clog streets.
The behaviour of unions, however, is
seen as an underlying problem that
extends to the transport company Atac,
where a leaked report this month
blamed the frequent closure of under-
ground stations on an 18 per cent
absenteeism rate.
Pietro Spirito, a former operations
director, said: “When I fired a bus driver
who was singing in a night club whileoff sick the unions defended him, say-
ing he was under stress.”
Calenda said there was an “un-
healthy relationship” between politics
and the unions. People close to political
parties were given jobs at city compa-
nies so the unions would not be threat-
ened, he said.
Spirito said union chiefs also entered
local politics, taking votes and “creating
an osmosis”. He said that during his
stint at Atac he had dealt with about 15
different staff unions. “They compete
with each to be more militant,” he said.
“When I tried to raise the relatively low
number of hours that train drivers
worked, trains were suddenly pulled
out of service for spurious maintenance
reasons creating huge disruption,
which in turn scared politicians, who
were afraid of public anger.”Italy
Tom Kington Rome