2026 

Oil on anodised aluminium

182 x 232 x 35mm, framed

To the painting’s right is Sicilian sculptor Benedetto Delisi’s 1872 Columbus in Chains in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Palermo. The sculpture depicts a historical episode from 1500, in which Christopher Columbus was deposed as governor of the Spanish colony of Hispaniola and taken in shackles to Spain. Doubtless conceived as the depiction of an embattled but still indomitable ‘great man’, time has made the sculpture into something else: a somewhat kitsch account of the humbling of a cruel, venal, utterly egocentric and vastly ambitious man in the best Italian Renaissance tradition. Through the sculpture’s reflection in the gallery’s visitor to the left, the painting becomes a play of dualities: male/female, animate/inanimate, organic/inorganic, along with the less material antithesis of hubris and dignified humility.