It is also known that José Ángel Valente is dazzled by the double profile (Impressionist and Expressionist) of Goya’s legacy. The Chapman brothers went so far as to first purchase, and then alter the etchings that were discontinued due to his death. Spain honours its best-known film awards with his surname, an art that has not been alien to his genius. And not only for the films that have been dedicated to him, but also for his impact on the visuals of Luis Buñuel, Alfred Hitchcock, Carlos Saura, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Milos Forman.

Goya is a state of mind of Western culture, the recurring adjective that best defines its consternations. There is no culture in this hemisphere that resists “applying” it, nor “national” art that does not have its own particular versions of the Goyaesque.

For all these reasons, the umpteenth verification exercise of his “Venezuelan” paintings is of little interest. In fact, if they were forgeries, they would not be so because we do not have meticulous investigations, but precisely because we have them.

After all, when researching Goya’s connection with Latin America online (and Venezuela in particular), the most overwhelming result does not refer to the painter, but to the canned goods. A link to those Goya cans that, on both sides of the Rio Bravo, Latinos consume en masse. Those products that -from beans to sweet potato, to the sauce used to marinate pork- also indicate our relationship with romanticism. If the painter Goya is the sum of a collector and his wealth, the Goya product is the sum of the popular classes that do not require any link with art to pass the seasoning brush over a leg of pork or a turkey. For the former, it is a matter of honour. For the latter, it is a matter of the oven.

In the first instance, the Chapman brothers stand out. In the second case, Iván Candeo. One, by signing Goya’s work itself. The other, using the supposed “micro-signatures” of the painter to serve as an appetiser to his Venezuelan cooking of the Goyaesque.

Of course, they both alter Goya’s work, but their operations are set in opposition. The Chapmans can afford to buy the unfinished engravings and then act on them to establish their fiction on a real, though unfinished, work. Candeo, on the other hand, acts on a dubiously completed work until it becomes an unfinished truth. The Chapmans place Goya in a Disney aesthetic, Candeo turns our Disney reality into several possible Goyas. The Chapmans colour the darkness while Candeo knows, with Bataille, that darkness does not lie. That being dark is a way of being Goyaesque. That it is not necessary to paint over it but to let oneself be subsumed by its black holes.

The fact that remains is that the Chapmans resort to rehash in the same way that Candeo opts for asado. Chapman’s Goya enters through the eyes, Candeo’s enters through the mouth (through the vast oral tradition of books, articles, documents that reference his Venezuelan paintings). One presents himself as an iconoclast, the other as an iconophage. In the Chapmans, authenticity is not discussed, whilst Candeo places authenticity under suspicion.

When the first world practices appropriation, it always ends up presenting the result as original. When we practise it in Latin America, no matter how original we are, the final result always appears as a copy. It is a mere question of aesthetic geopolitics.

In this project, Iván Candeo takes us back to the processes through which experts, journalists and critics took for granted the history of Goya’s paintings in Venezuela. Even the history of Venezuela in Goya. Because, apart from his own demons, the artist cannot resist Bolivar (like his Peruvian contemporary José Gil de Castro).

In the end, the Goya of this exhibition contributes to the main movement of our time, which is inertia. It is a truth that Iván Candeo has worked on conscientiously. There is his self-titled work, Inercia (2009), a video in which a brave Venezuelan cyclist pedals on his static bicycle, trying to reach, unsuccessfully, the Bolivarian ideal. And here and now, with this Goya who hides his signature in Caracas as Warhol hid Mao’s wart in New York.

There are artists for whom the countercultural inhabits ideology, the city, morality, and money. In Candeo, counterculture takes place in time. Like an alternating current in the tide, an out-of-tune rhythm, an object out of place.

Thus, there is no room here for the nostalgic question of uchronia. What would have happened if…? Candeo prefers to create the event, establish the coordinates for things to happen and, already on the fait accompli, launch his favourite question.
“What then?”