The Visitors

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The Duchess of Urbino :  I first saw her in Florence, in the Uffizi, in a painting by Piero della Francesca.  I brought her into my work when I was living in Rome, because for me she represented that moment when European culture arrives in the New World. In The Visitors, she comes back and still shows up in my paintings in various settings.

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The title works in more than one way. You have the Europeans who came to Latin America, with their religion, their paintings, their whole idea of what the world should look like. In these paintings, the flora and the ornament are everywhere around her, in fantasy, consuming, beautiful and overwhelming at the same time. She's calm and she looks back to the past, but everything is arriving around her in the present and it can't be stopped.

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This is how I think about the history of the Americas. Our culture was already rich and something arrived into the mix.  Although a dominant force, it could not hold down the will of my people. And what you have now is the merging of new flavors — still alive, still vital, still developing.