Passing;Posing From Coronation Of The Virgin 2005

Here we have Kehinde Wiley’s painting, and right away, I'm thinking about the layers of representation, like peeling back wallpaper in an old house. There's the young man, contemporary, in his jacket, but then he’s set against this backdrop that's all Baroque lushness, flowers, and ornamentation. Wiley’s paintings are never just portraits; they're conversations with art history. I imagine him thinking about Titian, or some other old master, and then inserting this figure, disrupting the narrative, asking questions about power, representation, and who gets to be seen, who gets to be ‘art.’ And the ribbon he is holding, is it binding or freeing? It’s as if Wiley is saying, ‘Let’s take these old forms, these old ways of seeing, and mess with them. Let’s see what happens when we put someone new in the frame.’ And that, to me, is what painting is all about – a constant remix, a way of seeing the world anew through the eyes of the past.