‘Excuse me, do you mind if we take a photo?’ This is how I could imagine the conversation started, simply and awkwardly, in the quietness of an art museum. It is common to expect to go to an art gallery to stare at art works; it is weird however, and subtly ironic perhaps, to have the focus shifted onto oneself. Viewers are forever just depicted as backs, silhouettes against the masterpieces, never actually proven to be involved. There is this assumption that our presence might detract from the paintings. So in a warped, viewer versus the viewed approach, Francesco Jodice, in fact, does the opposite—strengthens the works by transforming the role of the viewer. Being the only contemporary artist in the exhibition Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado, he avoids placing the work of art at its centre; rather, the viewer becomes a work of art. Within this relationship he considers that scarcely a trace has been left of the hundreds of thousands of visitors who have admired museum collections, and artworks like Mars by Diego Velazquez, over the course of the centuries. Recently, when I visited Brisbane’s new crown jewel to the cultural vultures, the exhibition Portrait of Spain: Masterpieces from the Prado (21 July – 4 November 2012 ), I began to realise how art can influence an era and vice versa. This exhibition from the Prado in Madrid is like a womb of Spanish art, with its mythological scenes, devotional paintings and exquisite still lifes: which left me unequivocally falling in love and ending up in a big green pit of envy. It was specially curated for the Queensland Art Gallery by the Museo Nacional del... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline
Diego Velázquez, Mars (El dios Marte), c.1638. Oil on canvas, 179 x 95cm. Collection Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. © Photographic Archive, Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid
