Anatomy of Desire, 1998    Suit of Lights on wooden chair    33x18x24"/84x46x60cm

A Goya print represents a bullfighter suspended in midair, his bullfighter's lance stuck neatly between the horns of a bull which charges its shadow and the shadow of the bullfighter, as they become one. The engraving, number 20 of Goya's Tauromachy, occupied a central place in the first sketches of this celebrated series of bullfighting images. It has always appeared to me to be a revealing and schematic work. Revealing precisely because of its centrality, and also because one suspects that the metaphor of precarious balance, of the tight-rope walker, holds an unexpected symbolic density. It is schematic not only in the sense that tauromachy constitutes a game in which life hangs in the balance of mortal risk, but also in the more demanding sense in which seeing hangs on a vertiginous string. It is schematic also perhaps because Juanito in the air is like the common man - everyman and no man - whom, like an aerialist, constructs his own conditions as a political subject facing mortal risks, an activity he engages in before the expectant gaze of a collective that is more or less phantasmal. What should we think about the suit of lights which, like a simulacrum of death, lies on the bare table of an installation by José Gabriel Fernández? What should we think of the mestizo features, the naked and brown body of the Black Diamond, that stare out from a photograph captured by the passion of Alfredo Boulton, and which Fernández included in his installation? How do we sow or embroider both of these records together, the body and its fleshless dress, the contemporary artist and the reference - ignored by many - to the historian Boulton, and therefore to the local circumstances of Venezuela and those of Latin America? How do we locate then, at the beginning of these working notes, the suspended figure of Juanito Apiñani, as Goya's bullfighter is named, in Goya's print?

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