Cézanne had painted them with majestic dignity, contravening the old postulate that card games are the exclusive domain of The Devil’s Prayer Book and dirty, black papers. Other artists such as Caravaggio, La Tour, Gerrit Van Honthorst, Goya, and Balthus had also discovered the hidden beauty behind compulsive gamblers. So where did that leave the puritanical circles, the authorities, and those who have always been bothered by fun and the waste of leisure, for whom gambling addicts are nothing more than oxen that must be prevented from seeing the big picture?
In his series of eight paintings, Cezanne gradually darkens the scene without removing the light from the players’ faces. Something similar happened at Manríquez’s house; the room used for displaying the “dirty papers” was brightly lit, but not the table or the faces of those involved. Although the neutralization of mistrust could explain the matter, it did not detract from the artistic value of the whole. The theatrical artificiality of the setting also stimulated the manifest desire to remain there. The inquisitive glances and suspicious movements accentuated by the overhead lighting had delighted viewers of Mannerist and Baroque art, the latter being the lighting model that Mr. Manríquez was determined to reproduce with strict fidelity three centuries after its apotheosis.
The calculated movements of the card shufflers; the meticulous and, consequently, refined displacement of each of the cards; the sulphurous sparks given off by the startled spirits; as well as the slight trembling of eyelids and lips, conscientiously suppressed, are indispensable material in the most famous theatrical productions. Were we witnessing the work of a great playwright? Why deny it? Or is it that these transgressors, as some consider them, have qualms about the aesthetically commendable? Their diatribes go in another direction. Vice not only enslaves souls to the gaming table, but also returns them to the real theater of operations to which the human race belongs. There is a belief that anything that is not theater or pantomime is confined to dreams or any state of brief drowsiness in which consciousness loses its histrionic qualities; and gamblers, however much they may regret it, acquire a histrionic and grotesque character because they remain confined to the antechamber of deception, something that tells them that the slightest carelessness will bring the blow, the unnoticed trick.
Manríquez, strategically placed in the foreground, stood out as a monumental figure silhouetted against the rest of the players, casting the only shadow that moved discreetly around the table: an image reminiscent of the sinister character in Toulouse-Lautrec’s Moulin Rouge, who seems to be supervising what is happening in the dance hall. The painting, like art in general, synthesizes the threats in advance. Seen through the small window of the room, the scene has many more pictorial overtones, the canvas being mostly a window, and it possesses (to the discredit of its detractors) the essential requirements that make a composition a work of art.
And finally, let’s talk about introspection. Card players, like the protagonists of other board games, develop a communion with their thoughts that is hardly surpassed by any other autarkic operation. Rarely has the circular relationship between cause and effect gone so far in the realm of human behavior, an additional reason to consider the aesthetic beauty of the game. It would not be risky to assume that some or all of these elements combined are what attract, like a magnet, the increasingly metallic greed of our protagonist.
Ernst Jünger noted this in one of his diaries when he wrote: “Late in the afternoon at Baumgart’s house on Rue Pierre-Charron, to play our usual game of chess (note that the nomenclature is interchangeable). In this game we acquire knowledge of the superiority of the spirit, not of absolute superiority, of course, but of a particular superiority, of a kind of logical compulsion, and of the sordid reaction of those who experience it”…
Obviously, almost none of the painters who have reproduced scenes of card games were unaware of the malevolent nature of the spectacle or the image of the man who cheats. Art shakes things up, but it does not destroy the stigma. Both Goya and Balthus enrich the scenes with a hint of overt complicity. In Goya’s painting, one of the players signals to his partner, and in Balthus’ version, the young man depicted is predisposed to cheating in order to win. As in Manríquez’s room, a kind of metaphysical duel is established, emphasized by the cold, calculated lighting coming in from one end. Art of an adulterated purity, but art nonetheless.
[Excerpt from the unpublished novel Carnada viva]
Image: Caravaggio, The Cardsharps, 1595. Kimbell Art Museum.
