Comparisons between a decadent late eighteenth-century monarchy in Spain and contemporary West Fife may be uncommon, but in the work of Alan Grieve we have just such a linkage. Begun in late 2018, Grieve’s response to Goya’s Los Caprichos has resulted in eighty drawings that do not map directly onto the prints, but riff off them in the manner of a Dunfermline jazz musician playing in the British Legion. The original Los Caprichos used satire as a means to expose the gap between the rhetoric of Enlightenment and Reason, and the daily reality faced by the majority of people.
‘Caprices’ were more normally images of levity and the fantastical, but Goya’s works were stolidly rooted in the society that produced them, and its many absurdities. Although claiming the title ‘Caprice’ did put the Spanish artist in the tradition of Botticelli and Dürer, who had also produced well known ‘Caprices’, the tenor of these works is much more sombre, a metallic laugh at the sexual, social and literary faults of a society that seemed on the verge of catastrophic dissolution.
Displayed as a ‘visual assault’ on one wall of the gallery, the eighty drawings by Grieve mark a different sort of satire to Goya’s. These are images that produce more of an immediate belly laugh of recognition that becomes tinged with empathy and sadness the longer that one looks. Grieve does invite us to laugh at and with his subjects, but with empathy and self-deprecation rather than an isolated moral disdain. With titles such as Nobody Cares, Winday Licker, Apocalipstick and Nowhere People, these are images as much about the contemporary status of an artist in a society that seems intent on destroying itself, individually and collectively.
Extract from text by Jon Backwood
