With this production by Acciona Cultura and in collaboration with the Beyeler Foundation, Room 64-65 of the Villanueva Building has been transformed into an intimate space for the projection of “La Quinta del Sordo”, a work by Philippe Parreno which offers visitors to the Museum the chance to travel back in time and experience the “Black Paintings” in the setting for which they were originally painted.

The project describes an invisible space, the Quinta del Sordo, where Goya lived before he left for exile in Bordeaux. Between 1819 and 1824 he executed a series of fourteen works known as the “Black Paintings” directly into the walls of the two floors of his house. The building was demolished in 1909 but the paintings remain associated with their original location.

The fourteen “Black Paintings” are on permanent display in Room 67 of the Prado’s Villanueva Building while Parreno’s “La Quinta del Sordo” can be seen in Room 64-65 where Goya’s two paintings that commemorate the popular uprising of 1808 against Napoleon’s forces are normally displayed: The 2^nd of May 1808 in Madrid and The 3^rd of May 1808 in Madrid (both of 1814). These have been temporarily moved for the duration of Philippe Parreno’s project to Room 75 where they will establish a striking dialogue with Velázquez’s painting The Surrender of Breda.

In Parreno’s “La Quinta del Sordo” the house is almost unoccupied and the air flows silently through it. The year is 1823, or perhaps 1825: this is not clear. Nor is the season of the year; it could be winter or summer, day or night. The images in this project establish connections between the paintings, forming a cosmology or universe which they themselves have created. As mythology has taught us, behind all cosmologies there is a cosmogeny, a process of the creation of universes, an attempt to order chaos. The original nymphs were associated with topography as both beings and spaces. This science-fiction film aims to represent that “space-existence”, a process in which Goya’s house becomes anthropomorphic so that it will forever remain a sublimation of the place in which the work of art was present.

To reproduce that space we have to travel in time. Parreno makes use of exceptionally fast cameras (500,000 frames per second) to record the paintings. Time makes contact with them and stops. The camera desperately scans the space in search of signs. Parreno reconstructs Goya’s house and garden in three dimensions in order to find its original acoustics. Where previously there was relief, now there is sound: that of fire and light traversing this forgotten space. The reflections of the lights in the paintings appear like lighthouse lanterns on the screen, intermittently illuminating what has long remained unlit. Here in the gallery visitors become immersed in a hidden world in which we find ourselves face to face with Goya’s “Black Paintings” in a rediscovered intimacy between the images and the ghost of a vanished space.

The painting are located on the right while on the left a fictional space appears in a film. Parreno guides visitors through the ritual of the projection. The film is shown several times each day at precise moments with a musician introducing each showing. Lamp light flickers in the gallery and the seats are arranged in a curve around the screen. Headphones allow for a binaural experience of the sound track which guides us into this interior world. The musician introduces himself before performing an original cello composition by J. M. Artero which leads into the film. This music is not audible with the headphones but it already disturbs the limits of this complex space. Interior and exterior combine, as do the imaginary and the real. The lights flicker and vary in intensity before fading into the darkness of the gallery.

In the artist’s words: “The principal issue in this work is that of image and space, regardless of the priority between the two, given that these two elements which constitute our realities stand out among all the other information, forming an indissoluble connection. This is an act of legerdemain between a space which becomes lost in its game of becoming an image, and images which aim to produce a space. ‘Hidden’ and ‘invisible’ beings appear and disappear in the film.”

For the making of this film Philippe Parreno worked with the internationally renowned director of photography Darius Khondji, the film editor Ael Dallier Vega, the Oscar-winning sound designer Nicolas Becker, and with Lexx, a music producer, sound engineer and co-inventor and co-founder of Bronze, a music-generating and AI platform and format.