TableauVivant
The castaways, no one
There have always been incompetents. A certain Chaumareys, a viscount by profession, managed to command a flotilla bound for Senegal. He took a philosopher as his advisor, a decision that usually leads to great calamities. Guided by ignorance and haste, he ran his frigate aground on a sandbank: his metaphysician had mistaken some storm clouds for the harbor of Cape Blanco.
To make matters worse, a storm broke out. In a last act of heroism, the captain embarked with his entourage in the few boats available and piled the rest of the passengers on a raft armed with ropes and planks. Although they tried to tow them to the coast, as soon as the sea became rough they cut the lines and wished them good luck. Almost one hundred and fifty people were left adrift, equipped with a packet of cookies and wine instead of water. The hulk was about twenty meters long and seven meters wide. On the first night, twenty died of despair and brawls. By the fourth day, the crew had dwindled by half. Another ship in the convoy found them twelve days later purely by chance: they did not know the course to Chaumareys and no one had ordered a rescue. Fifteen remained.
One can stroll through the red rooms of the Louvre and contemplate the painting that Géricault dedicated to the tragedy without knowing the catastrophe. It is a massive painting (almost five meters by seven) and yellowish, as if it were illuminated with those light bulbs they put in fishmongers. The painter composed the scene with bodies of corpses (involuntary models) to which he superimposed the faces of his friends. I read that the one on the lower left is Eugène Delacroix. What a misdeed: they desecrate your body and the credit goes to someone else.
In order to document himself, Géricault interviewed two survivors. Savigny and Corréard (respectively a doctor and an engineer) published a memoir of the disaster that became a small publishing success. On the first pages, they included a sketch of the raft, painted from life. The Louvre preserves many preparatory materials for the painting. One of those papers shows a cannibal feeding while other passengers are fighting. However, the painter decided to change the violence for despondency and despair. The victims, as we know, should not contain traces of immorality. The painted scene is very strange, almost mythological (that is, extemporaneous). In the lower band, a man looks resignedly at the depths of the sea, which is death. He wears a rag as a veil, in the manner of the imperial pontiffs. At the other end, his companions wave their arms as they catch sight of a ship (barely a speck) on the horizon. The characters rush over each other in an inefficient choreography: some, rather than asking for help, wave at the back of the one in front of them. The skins, instead of reddened and cracked, have a whitish and bloodless appearance. At the bow, a Haitian waves a scarf (all the blacks in the painting are one and the same model, a certain Joseph le negre, whose biography is exhausted in the epithet). The pose mimics that of those baroque tritons playing the conch shell in the Roman fountains.
History painting is a proven hoax. All of Géricault’s efforts (including enduring the stench of the morgue he turned his studio into) distract us, time and again, from the fact depicted. Nor does it help that the ship was named Meduse. Reviewing the canvas, one is reminded of the snaking bodies climbing like vermin in Doré’s engraving of the deluge, of Menelaus holding the inert body of Patroclus, or even of the meditative pose of the angel of melancholy drawn by Dürer. Of the shipwrecked? No one. The ones in the painting could be anyone, except those who were.
Clara Carvajal exhibits in Espacio Valverde a xylographic version of The Raft of the Medusa. To do so, she has compartmentalized the painting and has reproduced the scene by means of that crackling and angular line that the gouge allows. The plates have been installed on a structure, in the manner of a scenography. The chromatic alternation (a consequence of the inking for its printing) causes a dissonance that reinforces the strangeness of the scene represented.
The faces of the protagonists have been left empty and in the prints they appear colored in red. On the back of the installation, the artist has drawn the silhouette of some bodies peeking out of the faces. Their trace remains.
A colorful scene, in which marine animals appear, adds an element of vitality to the whole. Undoubtedly, the greatest beneficiary of the shipwreck was the local fauna. Every cloud has a silver lining, life goes on, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Joaquín Jesús Sánchez