Personal Statement: "what hides beneath"
If you were to take one quick glance at Caravaggio’s Bacchus and set aside all veneration for classic art or awe of Old Masters; if you were to just look at it,
excluding any notion of context, what would you see? Likely, not a Greek God. And Girl with a Pearl Earring? The painting is famous and because of that, it’s hard not to look at it and at the same time think about museums, or about the fictional, popularized love story recently enacted around it, or about Vermeer or Dutch Art or any number of things. But what does her face really seem to say?
These paintings, Girl with a Hoop Earring and Bacchanal, are a play on what I read within the original works of art. They are an exposure of the implications of
dinghy sheets and half-full bottles of wine, of parted lips and sideways glances. My paintings are the more blatant form of what hides beneath the veneer of the originals—a form that makes you step away from your reverence of the painting as something classic and elevated and to see it as a sexually charged piece of art, as a representation of a real person. The original Bacchus is not a painting of a Greek God; it is a painting of a model, pretending to be a Greek God, young and half-drunk. I have simply taken the image and its implications a step further, discarding the suggestions of mythology and leaving only the figure, his expression, and modern versions of the most important and telling props.
excluding any notion of context, what would you see? Likely, not a Greek God. And Girl with a Pearl Earring? The painting is famous and because of that, it’s hard not to look at it and at the same time think about museums, or about the fictional, popularized love story recently enacted around it, or about Vermeer or Dutch Art or any number of things. But what does her face really seem to say?
These paintings, Girl with a Hoop Earring and Bacchanal, are a play on what I read within the original works of art. They are an exposure of the implications of
dinghy sheets and half-full bottles of wine, of parted lips and sideways glances. My paintings are the more blatant form of what hides beneath the veneer of the originals—a form that makes you step away from your reverence of the painting as something classic and elevated and to see it as a sexually charged piece of art, as a representation of a real person. The original Bacchus is not a painting of a Greek God; it is a painting of a model, pretending to be a Greek God, young and half-drunk. I have simply taken the image and its implications a step further, discarding the suggestions of mythology and leaving only the figure, his expression, and modern versions of the most important and telling props.
All images on this site are owned and copyrighted by Rachel Sabin.