Violence is a hot ticket. With the blockbuster movie season around the corner, special effects-loving audiences eagerly await a summer of gushing blood and intricate pyrotechnics. But violence does not always come with a Hollywood budget and stunt coordinator.

In "Francisco Goya: The Disasters of War," on view at through August 9 at The Honolulu Academy of Arts, the horrors of war are depicted with disturbing detail in a series of 40 prints. The exhibit is the fourth Graphic Cabinet, an ongoing series that presents intimate groupings of work on paper from the Academy's permanent collection.

Goya's etchings and aquatints ignore large displays of power such as legions of soldiers or expansive battle scenes in favor of the sort of quiet, looming terror that keeps you awake at night.

Although some of the violence is overt, in the case of freshly bayoneted figures still standing or men hung, torn apart at the limbs, Goya is most effective in depicting the ghost of violence about to come or that which has recently passed.

In one print, the tips of a group of rifles point toward pleading peasants, the assaulting firing squad hidden beyond the frame. In another, lifeless bodies are stacked in anonymous heaps upon the otherwise barren ground.

Etched between 1810 and 1814, "The Disasters of War" was Goya's response to the long and bloody Peninsula Wars fought between local Spanish peasants and the occupying army of Napoleon.

The Academy's exhibit, organized by recently appointed curator of Western and American Art Theresa Papanikolas, chooses a selection of 40 from the 80 total prints in the series.

Rows of the small-scale etchings are packed tight in the exhibit's dimly lit room, encouraging the viewer to lean close to see the details of each image. The impact of this intimacy is such that the message becomes less of a political statement to shout over rooftops than a secret to be whispered.

The series is not a specific indictment of Napoleonic army as much as study of individual people and their terrifying experiences in the face of unfathomable terrors. Although Goya's prints may be nearly two centuries old, this message of the horrors of war and the political abuse of power is perhaps just as disturbing today as it was then.

Courtney Biggs blogs about art at www.arthonolulu.com.