Painting death is not easy. A painter who wants to show us a skull, a snuffed-out candle or a fly on a piece of fruit has to navigate the twin pitfalls of the theatrical and the sentimental. If you go too far, the work becomes a lesson on mortality. If you don't go far enough, it risks being merely pathetic. In the death of an insect, the loss is so minuscule it has almost no weight, and to make it matter without falling into melodrama requires honesty. Juanma Moreno Sánchez titles this small watercolour La cigarra, a name with the weight of myth. He does not just paint a dead insect; he paints the conclusion to one of our oldest fables about art and work, that of the toiling ant and the singing cicada. In the fable, the cicada's song is its crime, the thoughtless joy for which it must pay. The story ends there, with a moral about planning. This painting feels like the final verse that was never written, a serene and unsentimental look at what the end of the song is really like.
This huapango by the Mexican Raymundo Pérez y Soto, sung as a bulería by the great Camarón de la Isla, changes the point of view, and we are no longer talking about the death of the cicada, but about our own death. Deep down, when we mourn the dead, what we are really mourning is our own death. Our own, and everyone's.
Sing no more to me, cicada let your drone be done for your song in my soul strikes me like a dagger knowing that when you sing you are crying out your death
Under the shade of a tree and to the rhythm of my guitar I sing this huapango with joy Because life comes to an end and I want to die singing like the cicada dies
