Desastres de Guerra
Disasters of War.
Sumi Ink on Goya's etching series, mounted on canvas. 2022

Sumi Ink on Goya's Desastres de Guerra series, mounted on canvas.
84 paintings, 16x24"

84 sumi ink paintings on prints of Goya’s classic etching series, The Disasters of War which impresses the physical and mental impact of war—equating conventional war waged among nation-states with extractive practices upon human bodies and the environment. 
First exhibited at Artspace New Haven, CT. Curated by Laurel V. McLaughlin. 2022

Excerpt from text titled How to Delay Extinction
 
In 1824 Francisco Goya left his native Spain, following his own advice: “If you can’t put out a fire in your own house, get out of it.” War is usually painted in heroic tints, emphasizing the convenient fiction of brave deeds over the less honorific, filthy reality that is the norm in war. Goya’s awareness of war’s muddy, senseless, degenerate brutality was an important early example of the developing critical voice in European art history. Goya’s series, “The Disasters of War,” composed of 84 etchings are notable for their unromantic, physical, unflinchingly graphic tableaux of the depravity of war. Goya’s “fire” referred to the tumultuous transition of European power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie during the Napoleonic wars (1803–1815)—the brutal early stages of capitalist rule. 

Following Goya, climate change and mass extinction could be represented by the brutal images of its concrete effects on corporeal bodies, however, since the process involves geologic time—movements on a scale that we cannot comprehend as humans—this inexpressible, unfathomable enormity creeps into human consciousness in discrete ways. 

The devastation of our ecosystem is settling into becoming one of humanities’ deepest, inexpressible anxieties. A creeping horror, ecocide is not a traditional war fought between opposing armies— though it has distinguishing similarities, power players, and motivations. Timothy Morton advocated to replace the term global warming with a stronger one: “mass extinction, which is the net effect.” 

While extreme weather and geological events caused by the net effects of capitalism are very much real, they are also unthinkable, seemingly off-the-wall, and almost impossible to process. Novelist and social anthropologist Amitav Ghosh’s insight that writing about extreme environmental events risks banishment from serious forms of literature into “lesser forms” such as fantasy, horror, and science fiction: “It is as though in the literary imagination of climate change were somehow akin to extraterrestrials or interplanetary travel.”