A Bull’s Heart (2025)

“Then Ishtar climbed up to the wall of Uruk, the strong-walled,
and uttered a piercing cry and broke out into a curse, saying,
‘Woe to Gilgamesh, who has grieved me by killing the Bull of Heaven!’

But Enkidu, hearing the words of Ishtar,
tore off the right haunch of the Bull of Heaven and hurled it at her, saying:
‘I would do to you what I have done to him—
I would hang your entrails upon you as a girdle!”

— The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet VI

From the earliest mythical narratives, humankind has turned to the apocryphal presence of beasts, setting them in contrast to its own image of redeemer. In the myth of the Minotaur, the creature inhabits the labyrinth, a metaphor of darkness and the uncontainable. In every case, man does not confront a mere animal: he faces a force that exceeds the human, a manifestation of the sacred.

Yet what in antiquity was hierophany—a ritual sacrifice that bound man to the divine—has in modernity become spectacle. Bullfighting crystallizes this transformation: from rite to entertainment, from liturgy to the aesthetics of cruelty.

The culture of bullfighting carries with it an ethical paradox: the spectacle exists only insofar as the animal suffers and dies. The proclaimed beauty of the act rests upon an open wound.

The work of Luis Moscoso bursts forth as a radical critique of the way we contemplate such acts, presenting instead a kind of X-ray of morality, of the explicit and the macabre. It is a painting conceived not as depiction but as exposure, an image that reveals the psychic nature of the crowd and the society that sustains bullfighting.

When we examine the work closely, we may be tempted to dwell on its visceral surface—the violence, the pain, the blood. But the most unsettling aspect is not the explicit anatomy; it is the moral radiography proposed by the artist. The multitude attending the spectacle is not painted as people, but as silhouettes of emotions: jubilation, morbid fascination, incandescent euphoria. The spectator ceases to be a concrete subject and becomes pure impulse. Thus the work inverts the hierarchies: the animal is individualized, humanized; the crowd, in contrast, is stripped of humanity and reduced to herd.

The bleeding, tearful heart within the body of the bull is perhaps the key. That pictorial gesture—easily overlooked—is precisely the element that shifts our attention away from the supposed “epic” and toward the vulnerable core of the victim. It is what allows us to decipher the author’s message in its entirety: the moral radiography dictated by the work does not lie in the bull’s opened body, but in the eyes that behold it.

As AnimaNaturalis has observed, there is no possible aesthetic that can absolve cruelty.