Tauromachia 03 Painting

The corrida is a controversial phenomenon. It has been adored by the crowds for centuries, as a show apparently illustrating the honorable fight between a man and a giant, dangerous beast. Today we, the persons not subject to the direct cultural impact of the Iberian Peninsula (even though the tradition is not limited to that region) associate it with cruelty, bestiality and tormenting the bull to please the bloodthirsty mob. The corrida was meant to be a ritual – probably also one of initiation – aiming to show the human domination over the dangerous, unbroken nature, to mirror the fight between good and evil. Are we entitled to automatically attribute the good to man and the evil to nature, symbolized by the bull? In fact, it is just the opposite. The evil man attacks the bull, which is good like all nature, and provokes it to attack in its own defense. He sets a trap for it, misleads it on purpose to first enrage it then tire it to death and finally kill it. All that in order to prove his prevalence over nature, his world hegemony – and to satisfy his own vanity through this display of domination – or perhaps just to mask the hidden complexes, creating the false image of an omnipotent strongman, and feel the master of life and death, if only for a moment. The tauromaquia series by Joanna Jarco is not a holiday souvenir, and less still, an attempt to estheticize the death of the animal – even though it doubtlessly makes references to the Mediterranean culture. It relates to a tradition deeply rooted in the history of art: iconographic depictions of the corrida, among which the most famous ones were created by Francisco Goya and Pablo Picasso. The artist adopts a symbolic understanding of tauromaquia: it is an illustration of a phenomenon which can translate directly from a Spanish arena to the human psyche and the models of socialization applicable in our society. The man is the one who dominates; this definition comprises various authorities: the parents, the school, the system, the authorities, etc. The bull is us: the children, the students, the applicants, the citizens – all implicated in a relationship we cannot avoid. Like bulls, bred and trained for the corrida, we depend on those who rule us and who sooner or later will start to “tame” us, all while creating a fictional space of our alleged freedom of development and right to make decisions. Killing our inner bull means creating situations meant to break us and to force us to show unconditional submissiveness and conformism, making us act according to a pattern. It means cutting us off our natural intuition and off its sources. The show is as brutal as it is humiliating, and it usually takes place in public, like the corrida – its objective is to demonstrate the absolute power held over us and to making us perfectly submissive members of society in which horns – the attribute of free, unbroken nature, guided by its own laws and its own objectives – are unnecessary. Not all of us are like Fernando the Bull, capable of refusing to participate in the show – usually the banderillo’s strikes hit exactly where they were meant to and painfully launch the appropriate mechanisms, provoking us to enter a confrontation in which – like the bull in the corrida - we lose before the fight ever begins. Does the artist leave us any hope? It is more of a warning: when they try to kill your inner bull, watch out not to turn into a man.