Cesar Delgado

The Balcony

2018

This digital collage revisits René Magritte’s Perspective II: Manet’s Balcony, itself a transformation of Édouard Manet’s The Balcony. In Magritte’s version, the figures occupying Manet’s balcony are replaced by coffins, turning the familiar scene into a meditation on absence and mortality. Here, the coffins are replaced by Venus of Valdivia figures, shifting the image from death toward ancestry, fertility, and feminine continuity. The ancient forms occupy the balcony as stand-ins for the women of Manet’s original composition, connecting the representation of femininity in European art history with a much older visual language of ancestral womanhood. By moving through these successive substitutions—women, coffins, ancestral figures—the collage treats art history as a chain of images in which meaning is inherited, displaced, and rewritten.