THE HISTORIES PRESENTS A LAYERED EXHIBITION PRACTICE SHAPED BY HISTORICAL REFERENCES. THIS EXAGGERATED APPROACH, WHICH MONUMENTALIZES BLACK BODIES RENDERED INVISIBLE, SEEMS TO CONSTITUTE A VISION OF MODERN TIME CONSTRUCTED THROUGH DETAILED INTERIOR ARRANGEMENTS, FORMED BY QUOTATIONS AND METAPHORS. OR PERHAPS IT IS A GRAND DRAMATIC FICTION IN WHICH THE HISTORICAL PAINTING GENRE IS UPDATED AND CONTENT STRUCTURE IS INVERTED THROUGH A PLANNING OF ELEVEN SEPARATE ROOMS AND THEMES. THE PARODY OF HISTORICAL PAINTING DEVELOPED HERE IS LADEN WITH REFERENCES TO THE DAILY LIFE OF BLACK PEOPLE MARGINALIZED THROUGH A POLITICAL GAZE AND TO THE CULTURAL HERITAGE THEY CARRY FORWARD.

Peculiar, comic, or tragic modes of depiction that adapt stories of race, gender, identity, and migration to everyday life through a narrativized perspective have recently occupied the agenda. Kerry James Marshall, who transforms the ordinary lives of Black Americans into a performative space, presents an intense and fluid conception of staging through the powerful pictorial language he has developed. The artist, who integrates his paintings with a heavy criticism often nourished by humor, delivers a striking performance in his recent exhibition The Histories, held in London. (1)

The Histories, organized in the halls of the Royal Academy of Arts, possesses a layered exhibition practice shaped by historical references. This exaggerated approach, which monumentalizes Black bodies rendered invisible, seems to constitute a vision of modern time constructed through detailed interior arrangements, formed by quotations and metaphors. Or perhaps it is a grand dramatic fiction in which the historical painting genre is updated and content structure is inverted through a planning of eleven separate rooms and themes. The parody of historical painting developed here is laden with references to the daily life of Black people marginalized through a political gaze and to the cultural heritage they carry forward.

Moreover, these paintings adapted to modern life, time, and spaces stand through details that foreground a mimetic and observational attitude, grounded in both realism and fiction. With Marshall’s developed Black figural order or rhetoric, it becomes like a ceremonial film sequence of a contradictory and conflictual process -or the fate of colonization- examining the origins of African culture and the history of colonial destiny. On the other hand, these paintings, shaped by power struggles, where religions and ideologies are imposed, and where the grand historical composition genre continues, can be characterized as a micro-political discursive field, updated through explicit formal references to artists such as Winslow Homer, Velázquez, Jacques-Louis David, Ingres, Édouard Manet, and Georges Seurat.