CatharineClarkGallery

"My current work makes reference to European renaissance portrait painting. It targets the ability of paintings to convey power and desire through a discrete arrangement of signs. I take my source images directly from the web in order to explore further elements of commodity, and power in painting today. Pixel resolution is made evident in these images, as a kind of formal signifier of each portrait’s meaning in the contemporary world of web media deluge.

 

In the Dutch portraits, I focus on the symbolic function of seventeenth and eighteenth century portraits that represent the power of aristocrats, emperors, kings and soldiers through elements of dress, gesture, and other signifiers of accumulated wealth and power. The hybrid image that is developed with the merged images of women selling sexy fantasy, fetish and thematic costumes, elevates maids, widows, nurses and brides above the rank and file and makes them the new royalty.

 

This work creates a play with the institution of painting, as an institution that arranges these signs to actually construct power and desire through salability.

 

The adornment of both the women and the men solicit questions of long held beliefs about liberation, desire, bondage, hierarchy, sex and power." - Deborah Oropallo