The Confederacy of Spite and Prestige (2021)

The next work succeeding from the groundwork laid everybody nose (2020), this series of six digital artworks that have appropriated a portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte by Jacques-Louis David titled “The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries”.

One of these artworks was sold as limited-run print during spring 2021 through notjustashop’s collaboration with the Central Saint Martins’ SELL-OUT exhibition, organised to raise funds for CSM graduates. Printed on 320 gsm, Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl paper.

The works also feature a coloured border and digital markings that distort and re-contextualise the work, anchoring them in a contemporary setting rather than masquerading as a plausible original; as something my own more than a mere spoof that feels counterfeit. They are a reminder that we re-interpret history each time we read it, and never read it as it ‘was’.

While the series of artworks are limited in scope (to a singular portrait of a singular figure: Napoleon Bonaparte) it is nonetheless a fun exercise that can be further applied to other figures, a small and symbolic rebuttal to the veneer of colonial might and glory.