Marked by conflict and competition between words and images, reading and viewing, Francisco Goya’s Los Caprichos details the human condition during a period of social repression and economic crisis in 18th century Spain. The series of 80 etchings and aquatints denounces societal ills and clerical abuses, superstition and the decline of rationality. They are an absorbing, yet disturbing series with goblins, witches, monsters, animals, and strange creatures revealing a deep interest in exploring the expressive possibilities of the human imagination, with no clear boundaries to distinguish reality from fantasy. A seminal testament to Romanticism, Los Caprichos has influenced generations of artists, including Ariel Hassan.

OIKONOMIA 9, 2016, digital print on German etching paper, 28 x 20cm. Courtesy the artist and GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery, South Australia
Freedom, liberty, equality, power, desire, authority, oppression and submission level Hassan’s latest exhibition, ‘Making All Things Equal’ at Adelaide’s GAGPROJECTS. OIKONOMIA is a series of 30 digital prints in response to Goya’s Los Caprichos; “formed from the defacement of photographic documentation of extreme sexual practices, absorbed in an abstract fluid system of painting to reveal unexpected images”, says Paul Greenaway OAM, Director of GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery. Through confluent forms emerge a monstrous arrangement of figures – what the Gallery describes as a “relationship occurring between total abstraction and rationality.” These fractured pornographic images of bent bodies and spread limbs, reveal our desire for exposure and consumption, and the dissatisfaction thereof.
The images in ‘Making All Things Equal’ reference the provocative work of Jean Claude Guillebaud: “The irremediable antagonism between desire and the excesses of permission seems to support those prophets like André Breton who, toward the end of his life, feared that by revealing and permitting all, we might end up depriving desire of its force.” – The Tyranny of Pleasure (1999).
The text examines the place of the forbidden in contemporary society, questioning sexual morals and the naivety of 1960s ‘liberation’. The title is borrowed from Plato who praises the idea of pleasure but regards love as weak and condemns the man who lets ‘the tyrant Eros’ rule his heart.
Hassan’s signature monochromatic palette lends stark contrast between dark and light, providing a distinct mysterious quality. The ambiguity of Hassan’s images lies in the juxtaposition of their exterior form with the complexities that lie beneath their surface. In OIKONOMIA, Hassan explores human behaviour, its excesses and its boundaries. In defacing his figures, Hassan somewhat censors them, like Goya, in a way that almost denounces their conduct.
Accompanying the exhibition is REVERSAL OF CONTINGENCY INTO NECESSITY, a large-scale Neo-Romantic projection of a landscape devoid of human presence. The image is split, both formally and thematically. “In two perspective sections that fly away from each other, the structure acts as a proposition of opposite, possibilities of the same event—nihilism and morality, contingency and necessity. Separating the two planes are individual capital letters that systematically appear”, says Greenaway. These letters merge to form an excerpt from the chapter ‘Adjustment of Controversies’ by Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi.
Through philosophical thought, art history and social commentary, Hassan’s artworks create dialectical reasoning.
GAGPROJECTS/Greenaway Art Gallery
Until 27 November 2016
South Australia