SHIPWRECKED, NOBODY
Incompetence has always been present. A certain Chaumareys, a viscount by profession, somehow managed to command a flotilla bound for Senegal. He included a philosopher as an advisor, a decision that often leads to great calamities. Driven by ignorance and haste, he grounded his frigate on a sandbank; his metaphysician had mistaken clouds for the port of Cape Blanco.
To worsen matters, a storm ensued. In a final act of heroism, the captain and his entourage took to the few available boats, leaving the rest on a makeshift raft of ropes and planks. They attempted to tow the raft to shore, but as the sea turned rough, they severed the ropes, leaving nearly one hundred and fifty people adrift with only biscuits and wine instead of water. The raft, about twenty meters long and seven wide, became their sole refuge. The first night, twenty perished from despair and brawls. By the fourth day, the number had halved. Another ship from the convoy stumbled upon them twelve days later, entirely by chance – Chaumareys’s course was unknown, and no rescue had been ordered. Only fifteen survived.
One can walk through the Louvre’s red rooms and gaze at Géricault’s painting of the tragedy without grasping the scale of the catastrophe. The painting is massive (almost five by seven meters) and tinged yellow, as if lit by the bulbs used in fish markets. Géricault crafted the scene using real corpses as unwilling models, overlaying them with his friends’ faces. I learned that the figure at the bottom left is Eugène Delacroix. What an outrage: your body desecrated, and another gets the credit.
To prepare, Géricault interviewed two survivors, Savigny and Corréard (a doctor and an engineer, respectively), who had documented the ordeal in a memoir that enjoyed modest editorial success. They included a sketch of the raft, drawn from life. The Louvre holds many preparatory materials for the painting. In one sketch, a cannibal feeds amidst fighting passengers. However, Géricault chose to portray not violence but dejection and despair. The depicted victims mustn’t show any immorality. The scene is bizarre, almost mythological – out of its time. In the lower part, a man gazes resignedly into the sea’s depths, death’s embodiment, draped in a rag like an imperial pontiff. At the other end, companions frantically signal a barely visible ship on the horizon. Their movements are an inefficient choreography: some seem to be greeting rather than signaling for help. Instead of reddened, cracked skin, they appear pale and lifeless. At the prow, a Haitian waves a large cloth, his pose echoing baroque tritons playing conches in Roman fountains.
Historical painting is an adept deception. All of Géricault’s efforts, including enduring the morgue’s stench where he made his studio, distract from the actual event. Nor does it help that the ship was named Medusa. Reflecting on the painting, one recalls the serpentine bodies in Doré’s engraving of the flood, Menelaus with Patroclus’s lifeless body, or even the thoughtful angel in Dürer’s Melancholia. But the shipwrecked? They are nobody. The figures in the painting could be anyone but the actual victims.
Clara Carvajal presents a xylographic interpretation of The Raft of the Medusa at Espacio Valverde. She has segmented the original painting, re-creating the scene with the chisel’s angular, crackling lines. The panels are mounted like a stage set, and the color variations from the printing process add a jarring dissonance, emphasizing the scene’s oddity.
The faces of the protagonists are left blank, colored red in the prints. On the back of the installation, the artist has sketched silhouettes peeking through the faces, leaving their imprint. A vibrant scene featuring sea creatures adds vitality to the ensemble, suggesting that the local fauna were perhaps the true beneficiaries of the shipwreck. A reminder that out of misfortune, life persists – etcetera, etcetera.
Jesús Joaquín Sánchez.
