From Manet to Mexico: Mas Las Meninas

Works by Erin Currier | Acrylic and mixed media on panel

“What happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all of the works of art which proceeded it. The past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past”. T.S.Eliot

Las Meninas, Spanish for "Ladies in Waiting", is a title borrowed from one of the most alluded to paintings in art history-- that of Diego Velazquez. For philosopher Michel Foucault, who wrote extensively about the elusive painting in The Order of Things, Las Meninas represents a midpoint between the "two great discontinuities": the Classical and the Modern; for Giordano Bruno, it embodies the very "Theology of Painting": described as "the most searching comment ever made on the possibilities of easel painting".

​For my own purposes, I’ve chosen to continue to reference Las Meninas for its ability to inform and inspire. Everyone from Picasso to Joel Peter Witkin have recreated this painting into something entirely their own, adding to its reputation in the process. My ongoing series engages in a similar endeavor: it pays homage to Classical and Modernist masterpieces while addressing contemporary issues that have long compelled my work: immigrant rights, worker's rights, women's rights, civil rights; in short: human dignity.

​We find ourselves in an era in which it has become abundantly clear that the fruits of a relatively recent Colonial past, while enjoyed by a select few, have created suffering for the many; as well as ecological devastation for our Earth. Resistance movements calling for equality, respect for the natural world, and dignity for all, have expanded and proliferated. It is clear that the past that has informed our current reality is untenable. At the same time, while many would wish to erase every vestige of it: from statues, to street signs, to rhetoric in yesteryears’ novels; this is at best a futile endeavor, and, at worst, a dangerous one. We need not venture back more than a few years or decades to down what dark roads book-burnings and sculpture-demolitians have lead...

​My ongoing series posits a third alternative: one that both acknowledges and subverts: that literally, on a material level, transforms trash into treasure—into hopefully something of beauty; and, on a metaphysical level, transforms biblical and mythological figures, as well as portraits of royalty, into everyone from incarcerated firefighters, UFC fighters, Oaxacan surfers, Aboriginal beauty queens, Queens bartender-turned-Congresswoman, Balinese Schoolgirls, and feminine vanguards of Indigenous Resistance movements; through the esteemed art of Portraiture traditionally relegated to aristocracy—ie to oil barons and kings. The series calls for an utter transformation of the past on a grand-scale: into a brighter, equitable, ecologically viable, and dignified future for all.