Goya x Raúl Aguilar

Sala de Espera presents Las camas de la muerte, an exhibition bringing together works by Francisco de Goya and Raúl Aguilar.

The exhibition proposes a dialogue between two distinct moments in the history of imagery: the engravings of Francisco de Goya and the series El Libro Vaquero by Raúl Aguilar. In Los desastres de la guerra, Goya created powerful images about violence, power, and the human condition. Aguilar, for his part, draws on the iconography of the Mexican comic Libro Vaquero to reflect on how popular images continue to shape ideas about desire, conflict, and power relations.

By bringing both bodies of work together, the exhibition suggests that, despite the distance in time and context, certain themes and visual forms continue to repeat themselves: the body as a scene of tension, violence as spectacle, and the image as a form of memory.

The installation reinforces this dialogue through the exhibition space. Fragments of Aguilar’s collages are enlarged and printed on a large scale on the white walls, creating a visual backdrop that envelops the room. Goya’s original engravings are placed on these surfaces, reappearing now within a new context. In this way, contemporary images function as a framework that allows viewers to observe the historical work from another perspective, generating an encounter between popular culture and art history, and revealing unexpected connections between 19th-century printmaking and contemporary visual culture.

—Sala de espera