A timely and terrifying start to the Biennale

Beati pacifici: The Disasters of War and the Hope for International Peace

Chiesa di San Samuele, Venice ★★★★★

Alastair Sooke

“Yo lo vi”: I saw it. This is how Francisco de Goya inscribed the 44th plate of The Disasters of War, adding on-the-spot immediacy to a scene of panic during the Peninsular War. Anyone expecting to ease, spritz in hand, into the vernissage of the 60th Venice Biennale will be stopped short by this sombre, sobering exhibition inside the church of San Samuele. With its distressing, torrential imagery of mutilated corpses, Goya’s chilling 19th-century series provides the show’s centrepiece.

With tensions in the Middle East soaring, and Ukraine appearing ever more beleaguered, Beati pacifici couldn’t be more of-themoment. And, asks its curator, the charismatic Canadian collector and philanthropist Bruce Bailey, isn’t the Biennale supposed to be about exploring ideas and pinpointing the zeitgeist, rather than commercialism?

Arranged within the church’s nave, his exhibition provides a microcosmic history of the artistic treatment of war. Eighteen etchings by the 17th-century French artist Jacques Callot set the tone: each is a devastating miniaturised panorama of an atrocity committed during the Thirty Years War.

Can the art of war titillate as well as shock? In a provocative catalogue essay, the American writer Jackson Arn argues that it can. Looking, here, at prints by the German artist Otto Dix, which evoke his experiences as a machine gunner during the Great War, you feel Arn may have a point: there is something almost perversely gleeful, and certainly surreal, in these demented yet compelling images of haggard, corpse-like fighters.

To offset the darkness – and because, as Bailey wryly puts it, the church is in the business of selling hope – the show concludes, on the opposite side of the nave, with several optimistic images: Jack Chambers’s Five Shepherds (1961-62), irradiated by divine light; a 2007 etching, channelling Goya, by the Canadian Tyler Bright Hilton; and Country Rock (200001) by Peter Doig, in which a hallucinatory rainbow glows beside a monochrome highway.

Yet, it’s the cruel, cavorting imagery of Goya and Dix, as well as those grisly heads by Dumas, that stay with you. It’s not easy being reminded of our capacity for inhumanity, but, with a world war potentially in the offing, Beati pacifici feels urgent as well as powerful.

From today; labiennale.org

The art of conflict: Ration Carrying near Pilkem from the series The War (1924) by German artist Otto Dix