Looking at the work by David Nebreda in the exhibition’s section dedicated to the theme of madness and alienation, at first glance it is difficult to understand. Or rather, perhaps it is already understood, but the mind refuses to accept what the eye has caught. It is a face. Entirely covered with a brownish substance that leaves no doubt about its nature. The head of the artist who posed for that self-portrait is buried under a stream of excrement.

A mask of infamy that arouses horror. The head, the capital principle of the human body, has become anus mundi. The face has become a cloaca. Jean Clair relates this image to Dante's entry into the bedlam of flatterers, in the eighteenth canto of the Inferno.

Thither we came, and from it in the ditch
people I saw immersed in excrement,
which seemed from human privies to have come.

While peering with mine eyes down there, I saw
a head so foul with filth, that whether clerk’s
or layman’s head it were, was not apparent.

Of that disgusting and dishevelled wench,
who yonder claws herself with filthy nails,
and crouches now, and now is on her feet.

The horrid, the disgusting, are a privileged category of today's art. How do you compose with shit? - asks Jean Clair again. The artist, once upon a time, composed. Composition was a favorite word in the atelier vocabulary. Instead of composition, today there is decomposition. Never before has the work of art proved so fond of dabbling in filth and obscenity. And never has this type of art been so favored by institutions, much like in the good old days of regime-authorised art.

And Philippe Comar, in his text "The Hell of Madness", which traces back through the centuries how the interpretations offered to explain cases of collective madness have changed, writes: "The contortions of the convulsionaries and those possessed by the devil were at first a religious phenomenon, then a pa- thology, before being enveloped in an artistic aura. The fasci- nation of evil has existed since time immemorial, but what is new is its aestheticization. In this respect, the “beauty of evil” is a truly modern invention. This deadly beauty has nothing to do with Baudelaire’s consoling beauty – where everything was luxe, calme et volupté – but with the unhealthy curiosity St Augustine refers to. It is the mask of pleasure that human be- ings wear when gazing on horror and when their darkest pas- sions are aroused."