Lucy Jakub, NYRB, December 2018:
".....It was the lion known to the Roman, British, and French
empires, and the one that MGM took as its dynamic logo—the king of beasts,
which for all of Western civilization has embodied strength, courage, and
nobility. But it’s a doubtful honor; as Ford has put it, “when humans become
stalker/lovers of a certain animal, that animal is screwed.”
Each painting in the series is based on an encounter,
historical or imagined, between lions and people. Continuing a long
preoccupation of Ford’s, these often have an overt anti-colonialist and
anti-imperialist edge that is poignantly mirrored in the dynamic between humans
and their animal conquests. Ford punctures Jean-Léon Gérôme’s sensational
depictions of the Venatio in the Circus Maximus with MVNERA, which shows a lion
cowering in the elevator shaft that brought animals into the arena...."
The Christians’ Last Prayer in the Circus Maximus, 1883
Artist: Jean Leon Gerome (1824–1904)
Artist: Walton Ford, 2018