Some Words
THE SHIPWRECKED, NOBODY
by Joaquín Jesús Sánchez
There have always been incompetents. A certain Chaumareys, a viscount by profession, managed to command a flotilla bound for Senegal. He took along a philosopher as an advisor, a decision that often brings great calamities. Guided by ignorance and haste, he ran his frigate aground on a sandbank: his metaphysician had confused some storm clouds with the port of Cabo Blanco.
To make matters worse, a storm broke out. In a final act of heroism, the captain boarded the few available boats with his entourage and piled the rest of the passengers onto a raft made of ropes and planks. Although they tried to tow them to the coast, as soon as the sea grew rough, they cut the ropes and wished them good luck. Nearly one hundred and fifty people were left adrift, equipped with a packet of cookies and wine instead of water. The vessel measured about twenty meters in length and seven in width. That first night, twenty people died from despair and fights. By the fourth day, the crew had been halved. Another ship from the convoy found them twelve days later by pure chance: they did not know Chaumareys' course, and no rescue had been ordered. Only fifteen remained.
One can walk through the red halls of the Louvre and contemplate the painting Géricault dedicated to the tragedy without realizing the catastrophe. It is a colossal painting (almost five meters by seven) and yellowed, as if illuminated by those bulbs used in fishmongers’ shops. The painter composed the scene with bodies of corpses (unintentional models) overlaid with the faces of his friends. I read that the figure at the bottom left is Eugène Delacroix. What a misdeed: they desecrate your body, and someone else gets the credit.
To research, Géricault interviewed two survivors. Savigny and Corréard (a doctor and an engineer, respectively) published a memoir of the debacle that became a modest editorial success. In the first pages, they included a diagram of the raft, painted from life. The Louvre preserves many preparatory materials for the painting. One of those sketches shows a cannibal feeding himself while other passengers fight. However, the artist chose to replace violence with resignation and despair. The victims, as is well known, must not show traces of immorality. The painted scene is extremely strange, almost mythological (that is, anachronistic). In the lower strip, a man looks resignedly at the depths of the sea, which is death. He wears a rag as a veil, reminiscent of imperial pontiffs. At the other end, his companions wave their arms upon spotting a ship (barely a speck) on the horizon. The characters rush at each other in an inefficient choreography: some, more than crying out for help, salute the person in front of them from behind. The skins, instead of reddened and cracked, appear pale and bloodless. At the bow, a Haitian waves a handkerchief (all the Black figures in the painting are of the same type, a certain Joseph le Nègre, whose biography is summed up in the epithet). The pose echoes those Baroque tritons playing the conch shell in Roman fountains.
Historical painting is a proven con artist. All of Géricault’s efforts (including enduring the stench of the morgue where he turned his studio) distract us, again and again, from the depicted event. It doesn’t help that the ship was named Méduse. Looking over the canvas, one recalls the serpentine bodies crawling like vermin in Doré’s engraving of the flood, Menelaus holding the inert body of Patroclus, or even Dürer’s contemplative angel of melancholy. The shipwreck victims? Nobody. The figures in the painting could be anyone, except those who truly were.
***
Clara Carvajal exhibits at Espacio Valverde a linocut version of The Raft of the Medusa. She has compartmentalized the painting and reproduced the scene with that crackling, angular line made possible by the gouge. The plates are mounted on a structure, resembling a stage set. The chromatic alternation (a consequence of the inking process for printing) creates a dissonance that enhances the strangeness of the depicted scene.
The faces of the protagonists are left blank, and in the prints, they appear colored in red. On the back of the installation, the artist has drawn the silhouette of bodies peeking out from the faces. Their trace remains.
A colorful scene, featuring marine animals, adds a vitality element to the whole. Undoubtedly, the greatest beneficiary of the shipwreck was the local fauna. Every cloud has a silver lining; life goes on, etc., etc.