Death and End are inextricably intertwined. They play a crucial role in shaping our perception of the
world and defining phases in our personal lives. Over the past century, however, Western societies –
and Europe and America especially – have pursued a systematic, voluntary erasure of death from both public and private spheres. A recognition of the end of life is constantly postponed, aiming to suspend time, even to obliterate every trace of its passage.
Against this background, the work of Goya and Ruscha gains particular relevance. As gratuitous, random or ungraspable as they may appear to us, Death and End are subjects that Goya and Ruscha deliberately engage with. Beginning early in his career, Goya confronted death overtly, representing it in every shade – from haunting nightmares to gory war scenes. Equally, the notion of end is central to an understanding of Ruscha’s work: an end that gives order, meaning and form to potentially endless fields of objects, words, images, experiences. Guided by these premises, the following text is quite literally Janus-faced: half-essay, half-interview; half looking back to a relatively remote time – the Napoleonic Wars that ravaged the whole of Europe and their aftermath – and half dealing with our recent past, present and immediate future; half set in Spain and half in the US, or better, in California. The first part of the text deals with Francisco Goya –specifically with what was, in my opinion, a point of rupture in his career, as represented by his Self-Portrait with Dr Arrieta (1820) conserved at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. The second part of the text is an interview with Ed Ruscha, centred on the way subjects such as time and memory, change and end, have been addressed throughout his long career.
