Infanta Jacket

An image as a brushwork coffin, couched silently on red damask walls. In Gallery 625 of The Metropolitan, stares the Infanta, with the quaffed hair of an apricot poodle. A tight wave meets her face in caked white talc, marking the uncertainty of the transition between wig and skin: each their own sort of mask set atop something more amorphous beneath. Her bald child’s eyes, her jowls stuffed with roses, her nose, not yet grown into, and her bottom lip suspiciously waiting for impending adulthood to meet it. In all this covering and stillness, in the seriousness of a portrait that would trade her as an alliance, there was levity in the form of paint quivering into iridescent ghostly moths, her organza ornaments fluttering; glorious. The paint, though now cracked, still a frozen response to Velásquez’s eyes seeing hers and marking their own flutter of caution.  The Infanta Jacket is made from PVC vinyl layered atop custom-printed nylon taffeta, lined in the interior with silk charmeuse,