Las Meninas – After Velasquez - Jan-17-2015

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on February 26, 2015 at 7:50pm

Curator’s Comments: 

 

This latest series of art historical appropriations are quite clever, offering up appealing abstractions of iconic figurations. I’m particularly attracted to Las Meninas (after Valesquez) because of the weight of the ostensible human absence within the darkened interior.  I’ve seen the original Las Meninas rated as one of the most exalted paintings throughout Western history by art historians; there’s no question the original captures the imagination when it comes to formal concerns, self portraiture and the nature of patronage.  Your version steps outside these threads in some ways by distorting the organic forms in the foreground and pushing them out of recognition, but then the new piece comes back around to the nature of figural painting with an entirely constructed/fabricated  environment set as an open stage.  The colors are vivid, and suggest the glow of digital manipulation.  But the gestural mark making is also very much, for me, about seeing the artist’s hand in the work.  The small flickers of light in the top section relieve the dark solidity of the space, and energize the picture.