Transits.

Jesús Isnard, 2025

The presented photographic series consists of 12 works that form an intimate and contemporary dialogue with one of the most enigmatic masterpieces in the history of Western art: Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez (1656). The celebrated canvas, housed in the Museo del Prado, is not merely a portrait of the Infanta Margarita and her entourage; it is, above all, a reflection on gaze, representation, and the very limits of art itself. Velázquez, both author and character, painter and figure within the painting, places us before a labyrinth of perspectives where reality and fiction intertwine, where the viewer, in turn, becomes the protagonist.

From this starting point, the twelve photographs gathered here explore a contemporary reinterpretation: an attempt to free the characters from their original frame and grant them a new existence. The models do not appear as mere recreations, but as presences that fluctuate between the pictorial and the living, between the eternal quality of oil paint and the ephemeral nature of flesh.

In some pieces, the scene faithfully reproduces Velázquez’s composition, though veiled in a soft blur, as if art history were filtering through a translucent fabric that simultaneously conceals and reveals, reminding us that all memory is imperfect. In others, the characters seem to abandon the painting, crossing its boundaries in a gesture of escape toward the present, bodies emerging from the past to claim a space in contemporaneity.

One of the key images of the series places the viewer in an unusual position: inside the painting itself. From this vantage point, the camera captures the characters from behind, reversing the logic of the original work and subverting the gaze Velázquez had constructed. If in Las Meninas the viewer is addressed from outside the canvas, here they are invited to occupy the hidden space, the place of the invisible, becoming a privileged witness to pictorial fiction.

Taken as a whole, the work proposes a journey through what is visible and what is veiled, through what is revealed and what remains in shadow. Thus, the gestures, gazes, and compositions do not merely reproduce an icon, they expand it, opening a space where painting and photography, past and present, intertwine. More than a reinterpretation, these images are an exercise in transition: a voyage back and forth between art and life. An exploration of the thresholds between what endures and what fades away, between what is fixed in the eternity of a canvas and what insists on emerging, fleetingly, before our contemporary gaze.

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