And There Is Nothing to Be Done

By Theresa Rézeau 

Exile, war, and the artist's conscience do not remain separate. They collapse into one another, until what remains is not a position to be taken, but a condition to be endured.

There is no argument left. Only a body, suspended.

In one of the most austere images ever produced, Francisco Goya presents a figure broken by violence, hanging in a space that refuses both context and consolation. Beneath it, the words are spare to the point of finality: Y no hay remedio — and there is nothing to be done.

No cry rises from the plate. No rhetoric surrounds it. No redemption is offered.

The image does not ask the viewer to choose a side, nor does it grant the comfort of moral spectacle. It confronts us instead with the point at which explanation has already failed. Whatever language once justified the violence has been emptied by the fact of what now hangs before us. What remains is not resolution, but remainder.

Francisco Goya does not show war as event. He reveals what lingers when the language around war has exhausted itself.

This is where the artist's conscience begins.

The Disasters of War belongs to a mode of seeing very different from the great public claims of history painting. These etchings do not monumentalise suffering in order to convert it into patriotic memory. They move in the opposite direction. They strip away grandeur, rhetoric, and historical self-importance until what is left is exposure. The body, the wound, the landscape emptied of transcendence, the human figure abandoned by narrative.

Goya is not a commentator here. He becomes something harder to bear, a witness to what refuses resolution.

The phrase Y no hay remedio can sound, at first, like surrender. It can be read as exhaustion, as if the artist has ceased to believe in resistance. But the force of the image lies elsewhere. This is no surrender to violence. It is a refusal to grant violence the dignity of false meaning. Goya will not allow war to appear morally coherent simply because power insists that it is.

War always arrives with its own theology. It presents itself as necessity, as purification, as tragic inevitability, as defence, as justice, as destiny. It demands allegiance not only of armies but of language. It insists that everything be named quickly, that loyalties be visible, and that ambiguity be treated as failure of nerve. In such a world, perception itself becomes endangered.

Goya's etching interrupts that command.

The image refuses forward movement. It holds us instead in a condition where something irreparable has already occurred, but understanding has not caught up with it. The gap between action and understanding remains open, and it is precisely in that open wound that the artist stands.

What Goya establishes here does not remain confined to his moment. It becomes a lineage. Again and again, artists return to this position, not as imitators of his form, but as inheritors of his refusal. They reject the demand that suffering be made legible through ideology. They resist the conversion of violence into spectacle or moral clarity. As war expands in scale and distance, and as images begin to circulate faster than thought can follow them, the pressure to simplify intensifies. Art is asked to take sides, to justify, to mobilise. Yet the most enduring works do something else. They hold the fracture open. They do not resolve it through narrative or redeem it through symbolism. They allow the viewer to remain in proximity to what cannot be made coherent. This is not a style. It is an ethical position. And it is one that becomes increasingly difficult to maintain in a world that accelerates judgment, compresses experience, and transforms images into signals to be processed quickly and categorised immediately. Under such conditions, Goya's gesture becomes even more radical. To slow perception. To resist conclusion. To refuse the transformation of suffering into meaning.

This gap is not merely conceptual. It is lived.

To inhabit such a space for any length of time requires a particular discipline. One must resist the seduction of simplification without falling into paralysis. One must remain morally awake without converting every wound into an argument. For the artist, this becomes a daily condition of tension: to carry outrage without becoming rhetorical, to remain lucid without hardening into cynicism, to refuse consolation without surrendering the possibility of meaning altogether. It is not a heroic position. It is an exposed one. The body bears it. The nerves bear it. Language itself begins to feel insufficient, yet one continues, because the alternative is to let distortion take the place of sight.

This is why the artist in exile so often speaks from a place the public finds difficult to tolerate. Exile does not produce purity. It produces doubleness.

One may oppose the regime that drove one out and still recoil from the destruction of the country left behind. One may know censorship intimately and still refuse the cleansing language of war. One may reject power and yet remain bound by love to the landscapes, gestures, and sounds through which one first learned the world.

From the outside this can appear contradictory. From within exile it is simply accurate.

Exile does not erase belonging. It alters its temperature. It keeps the attachment alive, but changes its quality, making it at once more fragile and more difficult to defend. It lingers, not as certainty, but as a fragile continuity that must now be defended inwardly.

In moments of conflict, artists living far from their countries of origin have found themselves criticised not for silence, but for refusing escalation, for opposing both the powers that exiled them and the wars that threaten to erase what remains of home.

The artist who has left does not leave entirely. What remains is not only political memory, but sensuous memory. A way light fell across a particular wall in late afternoon. The sound of a market closing. A grandmother's inflection. The pressure of a language inside the mouth. The movement of people greeting one another in the street. These things persist with a force that is neither sentimental nor voluntary. They form part of the self long after departure.

And when war threatens the place from which such memories come, it does not threaten only territory. It threatens the inward archive through which the exiled person continues to belong.

That is why war wounds the exiled artist twice.

It wounds first through the anticipated suffering of those still there. But it wounds again through the knowledge that the place carried internally is being altered, shattered, or rewritten in real time. Streets become targets. Buildings become symbols. Neighbourhoods become strategic language. The intimate world is translated into abstraction. The artist watches as memory is forced to compete with narrative, and narrative, under conditions of war, is ruthless.

And sometimes the loss is quieter than destruction. A street renamed until it no longer answers to memory. A building still standing, but emptied of the life that once defined it. A language spoken differently, its rhythms altered, its silences unfamiliar. The artist recognises the place, and yet cannot fully recognise it. What remains is not return, but dissonance.

At that point exile is no longer only spatial. It becomes temporal as well.

One is estranged not only from place, but from continuity. The remembered country and the threatened country begin to drift apart. What was once carried inwardly as a living relation becomes unstable. The artist finds themselves defending not merely a political position, but the right of memory to remain complex, undistorted, and human.

Goya's image anticipates this condition. The suspended body is not anchored to identity. It could belong to anyone.

Francisco Goya (1746–1828), Y no hay remedio (And There Is Nothing to Be Done).
From The Disasters of War, c. 1810-1820. Etching.

The absence of context does not weaken the image. It intensifies it. Violence has already removed the markers that would allow us to situate the figure within a narrative. What remains is exposure.

This exposure defines the artist's task.

To witness violence without immediately submitting it to ideology is one of the most difficult forms of attention. It requires resisting the comfort of explanation. It demands that we remain with what we see long enough for it to disturb us before we convert it into proof.

What is lost in that conversion is not only complexity. It is truth.

The contemporary public sphere accelerates this loss. It rewards immediacy, clarity of position, visible allegiance. It turns moral life into performance.

To speak is often to declare. To hesitate is to risk suspicion. In such conditions, the act of seeing becomes subordinate to the act of aligning.

The artist's refusal interrupts this sequence. Not as evasion, but as discipline. Not as neutrality, but as fidelity to what resists simplification.

Goya's etching does not tell us what to do. It tells us what it costs when seeing is overtaken by justification.

And there is nothing to be done.

The words remain, not as surrender, but as exposure. Something has already been done. The body is still there. The image does not close.

The artist, like the figure, remains suspended between knowing and speaking, between belonging and distance, between the demand to declare and the responsibility to see.

They cannot repair what has been broken. They cannot prevent what may come. But they can refuse the lie that destruction becomes meaningful simply because it is named as necessary. And in a world that demands certainty at speed, that refusal is not weakness.

It may be among the last forms of clarity left.