MARIANNE

I am not a French Marianne, I am a Marianne of the world...

There are artworks that are not merely seen. They are read.

On August 26, 1789, in a week of intense debate, the French National Constituent Assembly voted article by article on the seventeen articles of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Inspired by the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the spirit of the Enlightenment, this founding text proclaims that men are born free and equal, that the law is the expression of the general will, and that the freedom of thought and expression is sacred. This is not a French text. It is a universal text and history would prove it with lightning speed: by 1794, clandestine translations of the Declaration were circulating in Bogotá, fueling what historians call 'the muffled rumor of a second Paris.' Starting in 1810, in less than two decades, Colombia, Venezuela, Mexico, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Brazil twenty new republics were all born from the same flame ignited in Paris. The French constitutions of 1852, 1946, and 1958 rely on this text, as does the European Convention on Human Rights signed in Rome in 1950 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948. Ideas travel faster than armies. And they last infinitely longer.

My name is Marianne. I was born in the turmoil of the Revolution, with the broken chains of Tyranny at my feet, crowned with the Phrygian cap the eternal symbol of liberty and I belong to an ideal greater than any nation. In this representation of friendship between the country where the artist O Gringo was born and the country he adopted, I emerge from the black background like a truth that can no longer be ignored. My cap explodes in blood red the red that was shed for me, for my ideas, for that word engraved in the stone of every republic in the world. The tricolor cockade I brandish is torn, alive, imperfect exactly as liberty has always been, exactly as it always will be. And on my dress, in those deep blues that span the centuries, are three words I have carried from Paris to the far reaches of the Western world, three words that have toppled thrones, drafted constitutions, and liberated entire peoples: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.