Velázquez, Portraits

From the Prado of Madrid arrives in Carrara the Portrait of Queen Maria Anna of Austria, one of the last masterpieces of the “painter of painters” – according to Édouard Manet – Velázquez (1599-1660). NEO [Narrative Environments Operas] introduces the exhibition with the installation “Velázquez, Portraits”. A portrait is an instant that tells a whole life, it’s a moment that in its passing becomes eternal. Those that the painter Diego Velázquez realizes in the course of a lifetime reveal his deep love for truth. Velázquez always portrays, portrays everything, with imperturbable phlegm.” He loved Caravaggio and adored Titian, but remains uniquely and deeply Velázquez, painter of the king, even when he portrays dwarfs and buffoons. The video installation dedicated to the Spanish painter invites the public to get lost in front of numerous images of paintings that show the emancipation of the portrait as an expressive form, beyond hierarchies, pictorial genres and conventions. The composition of the images, next to each other, recalls the exhibition structure of the great nineteenth-century museums around the world.