Upon viewing Picasso's LAS MENINAS side by side with Velazquez and other works that led the ground work for it, I was struck by the concept of the mirror -- a reflection that holds still a cropped image of the world. Like the Albertian window of the Renaissance that acts as if a frame, the mirror too spreads towards us incorporating us in it's grasp. A mirror removes reality from one location and places it quite swiftly into another. A mirror collapses space into itself, pressing that which is reflected upon its surface firmly into a concave space - all the while actual space spreads outward convexly from it. A mirror is a doubling of reality -- the face being reflected is also the face that is looking at it. One can't help but be reminded of photography and some of the essays of John Berger.
LAS MENINAS "The entire picture looks out onto the scene for which it is itself a scene." Michel Foucault 1966 -- a mirror does just that - separating one scene from thousands of others --
action is now static
and held
memorializing itself forever
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