Domingo Barreres
Boy Impostor, 2002, 86" x 73 ½", mixed media on canvas, Lent by the Artist; Courtesy Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA
Las Meninas by Velázquez is a painting that appears to be the essence of innocence and serenity, but is, in fact, a painting that conceals several clear schemes.
I refer to it in order to explore such themes as: obsessive ambition, beauty as mask for hidden agendas, or how anachronistic notions of identity may jeopardize such human traits as curiosity, imagination, carnal appetite, and love through sexual expression—even rationality itself.
The degree of reference to Las Meninas varies. Sometimes only the dog is appropriated (tamed wolf or altered natural inclinations), or the Cross of Santiago (greed for higher social ranking).
The technical virtuosity of the seventeenth century parallels the new trust in rationality, a way of thinking recently divorced from myth and religion, but whose misuse, and subsequent illusion of superiority by the European elite, would cloud the future even to our present day.
—Domingo Barreres
Please join the artist for an informal gallery talk on Saturday, July 27 at 3pm.
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