Layering
Las Meninas
Moments of the Painting
Based on the text of Michel Foucault, "The Order of Things", I have translated the concepts behind Velazquez’s masterpiece through my narrativity into another visual work, in another medium. This video uses notions of time and space to highlight the items existing in the original, to show how Velazquez played with foreground, background, inside and outside, in a single flat surface.
Breath of the Picture 1
With Breath of the picture, I tried to highlight the concepts of time and space in Velasquez' work in another way, this time using collage techniques. Size, color saturation and transparency of the different elements of the original artwork have been changed and quotes of Foucault's text on Las Meninas, like "space, time, invisibility", "breath of the picture", "seen or seeing", "representation, represented" and "definition of space" are added.
Digital print (left), Silkscreen (right), 2010
Breath of the Picture 2
Each time an artwork is viewed new discoveries can be made about it: upon the second or third look different things catch the eye, and new connections can be made. I bring out particular details in the work in order to emphasize this mode of perception over time. There is near infinity of possible meanings to build from on the same artwork.
Digital print (left), Silkscreen (right), 2010
About Reproduction
This sample of a silkscreen deals with the idea of "value" in artwork. The concept and the idea standing behind of an artwork is the privileged value than it’s being as an object. The concept of an artwork can never be copied, but the object can be re-produced as a medium of communication. Every re-production gives different information and access to the original one. With this image I used one of several samples of "Las Meninas" on the Web to convert it in silkscreen image, reduced as an object to a certain combination of CMYK to underline the importance of the "idea" of an artwork rather than as an object.
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70 cm x 100 cm
Silkscreen, 2010