Folly? Not at all: Goya and Castellon at the K.I.A.

Humanity at its ugliest can inspire the most worthwhile and exquisite forms of expression. This is highly evident in “Fear and Folly: the Visionary Prints of Francisco Goya and Federico Castellon,” exhibited at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts until May 23rd. The two artists’ horrifying and macabre conceptions of the human condition muse poignantly on the state of humanity. The compelling works are carefully selected from the K.I.A.’s own print collection. This is a wise move by the K.I.A., drawing on their own collection both saved money by not requiring the fees associated with an expensive traveling exhibition and promoted civic pride in the museum’s collection.

The austerely framed prints line the K.I.A.’s downstairs hallway, which provides a less-than-dramatic background for an exhibition meant to be striking and eerie; in addition, an inadvertent and rather jarring comparison is invited by the fact that the two artists’ works are separated by the museum’s small African and Mesoamerican collection. The constraints of a small museum are obvious in the show’s location in the building as well as signage—only some of the images have explanations for viewers.
The museum’s presentation of Goya’s lithographs was fairly strong. In “The Proverbs,” (most of the series is represented and is presented in the proper order) Goya offers up some notable images: a hellish horse carries away a woman in the aptly named “Unbridled Folly,” a shrouded giant looms over a battlefield in “Fearful Folly,” and distracted women toss about dolls that look horribly like men in “Feminine Folly.” His famous “Disasters of War” is rather more successful and impressive, but the “Follies” make their message known—the often futile ridiculousness of human life. The incorporation of Goya’s recognizable flying demons and people with faces like something he stretched out of putty makes this array of prints a mostly satisfying spread for a small Midwestern museum.

Though Goya is the better known of the two artists, his lithographs at the K.I.A. were outshone by Federico Castellon’s compelling and grim works, which were created around 150 years after Goya’s. Labeled a Surrealist by critics, Castellon produced piercing sequential illustrations of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” in the 1960s. An etching early in the series, entitled “It was a voluptuous scene, that masquerade,” (1968) depicts a shadowy nude woman surrounded by pot-bellied demons and black color fields. Castellon depicts other masqueraders at the deadly party—ladies in Battenberg lace dresses with rosebushes for heads, horned men, and all manner of despotic characters doomed to death. Hieronymus Bosch would appreciate the creatures that Castellon has created—they are vibrant and abhorrent, masquerading as fish-people, trees, and rotting ballerinas with buckets for heads. His figures throb with terror and the sense of loneliness that Poe’s tale makes so inescapable. The world he constructs for these creatures is hazy and atmospheric, and when the “Red Death” himself appears as a gaunt skeleton near the end of the series, the viewer, safe in the low hallway of the K.I.A., is rightly terrified.

Inciting fear in the hearts of Kalamazoo viewers with its horrific and devastating images, “Fear and Folly: the Visionary Prints of Francisco Goya and Federico Castellon” is certainly not folly.