Courtesy of University of ARizona Museum of Art

Other articles by Dennis O'flaherty:

It all started at a Parisian pay toilet Ex-UA student directing 'Miracle'Play explores consequences of small actions This won't be same old 'South Pacific' Simply incredible transformations 'Pump Boys and Dinettes' fits in with folk and biker festivals here 'Holy Spirit' a journey of self-realization Play based on papers woman hid from Nazis Beowulf Alley brings a rich farce to town 'Beauty' of it is that it was first an opera, then a movie

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Goya has a contemporary counterpart.

The University of Arizona Museum of Art, which is showing "Los Disparates," the second installment in the four-exhibition cycle of etchings by Francisco de Goya, has paired his etchings of disturbing, often grotesque images with a contemporary artist who echoes Goya's often upsetting look at the world.

Goya's 22 works on exhibit are accompanied by 18 pieces by Victor Huerta Batista, an artist who was born in Cuba in 1972.

When first planning the Goya series, Lisa Fischman, the museum's chief curator, was concerned that the exhibit would seem too "historical."

"As a university museum, one of UAMA's primary missions is to reach out to students," she said.

Her solution: "I decided to accompany each of the suites of Goya prints in the series with the work of a contemporary artist who's on the same wavelength — that way the viewer can see that Goya's vision remains absolutely relevant and resonant today."

The Huerta works in the show are making their debut appearance in a U.S. museum. It's quickly apparent that Huerta is channeling the same strange source of inspiration evident in the Goya etchings. Each artist is working within the territory that has been called "magic realism" — as UAMA's notes explain it: "Real experience meshed with fantastical imaginings, personal mythology nuanced by political critique, precise rendering amidst strange artificiality and psychologically charged atmospheres."

Huerta's images burst with the strange, the grotesque, the provocative. It could take days just to study one image, such as "Viajar no es el problema VII" (Travel Is not a Problem #7), a ship floating in a large pot that sits on a cooking stove, small nude figures — escapees? — dangling their feet off the edge, an almost shadow figure of a wind blowing the sails of a boat that has nowhere to go.

Like Goya, Huerta has created works that seem to come right out of the subconscious of an artist feverish with imagination and expertise, and who is clearly not the least bit bothered about what the viewer might make of his images. Scholars could easily fill stacks of pages with explanations of what the works in this show mean, but let's just leap over all the art-criticism stuff and say plainly: They should be seen.