Sul palcoscenico di una graphic novel: Otto Gabos a confronto con La tentazione dell’abisso di Francisco Goya

The aim of this paper is to analyse the relationship between the verbal and the visual in a relatively new genre, in order to test the effectiveness of these two timeless forms of expression. In 2023, Otto Gabos produced the graphic novel Francisco Goya. The Temptation of the Abyss. Eighty pages long, the same number as the Spanish painter’s Caprichos, it is not intended to be a simple biography of the artist. On the narrative level, a singular plot is gradually built up between the speaker of the work and Goya, leading to an “impossible” dialogue, but one that can be realised thanks to fiction. The cover of the volume – a reinterpretation of The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, an etching and aquatint made in 1797 and published by Goya two years before the other engravings of the Caprichos – already declares the stylistic characteristic of the novel: the speaker will propose a fusion, almost a “paper reincarnation” of Francisco Goya. The autofiction used by the author unfolds a battle of wits, interspersed with dreamlike moments, visionary ruptures, doubts and questions, capable of shedding new light on the work of both. A confrontation between an artist from the past – Goya – who returns to the present, and an artist from the present – Otto Gabos – who projects himself into the past.