In sumptuous paintings, a rising art star updates the 17th-century portrait

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — The women wear high-collared puffer jackets and billowing sports jerseys, the fabrics richly painted in acid yellow and bubblegum pink. Bathed in cool light against shadowy backdrops, they seem to glow as they regard the viewer dispassionately with an aristocratic air.

For the past few years, the Spanish artist Nieves González has taken the earthy backdrops, dramatic lighting and opulent fabrics typical of Spain’s Baroque period and pulled them into the future. The artist’s imagined female subjects possess the demeanor of an ambitious noblewoman or devoted saint, but their wardrobes are wholly contemporary.

They are also imbued with a touch of the absurd: Some hold pool inflatables or sports paraphernalia; others have hair cascading to the ground. Symbols drawn from mythical and religious paintings become tongue-in-cheek additions, such as the swan — a nod to Zeus — as a lap animal, or the biblical serpent as a pool tube.

The delight in contemporizing the antiquated past may feel akin to the Pope in cassocks and a White Sox baseball cap, or a good medieval meme. But the artist’s reverence for the medium is clear in how she paints, delicately rendering texture and light to romantic effect. A painter since childhood, González’s practice is born from her fascination with Baroque art, and her own classical training at the University of Seville.

“I’m very attracted to the power and intensity contained in the figures, in their postures and their garments,” she explained over email. “Seeing those works again and again was fundamental to understanding them from a pictorial standpoint, and also to imagining other possible interpretations.”

Though already a rising art star, González’s work burst into the mainstream when she painted Lily Allen for her explosive tell-all album, “West End Girl,” after the creative director Leith Clark found her work online. In the portrait, Allen appears in a polka-dot robin’s blue puffer jacket and black lace, her cropped bangs framing her brows. Art and fashion publications jostled to interview her as the album cover took off online; during Allen’s press tour, “Late Night” host Jimmy Fallon even presented the singer with a real version of the imagined puffer.

“It was very overwhelming,” González said of the response, as she was suddenly flooded with messages online. “It was something I didn’t expect and that has generated great visibility for my work.”

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Even before “West End Girl,” González’s work was already gaining attention. In December, her show “Sacred Hair” opened at T293 gallery in Rome, and the Santa Monica, California-based gallery Richard Heller displayed two of her paintings at Untitled Art Fair in Miami Beach. Next up, she’ll exhibit a solo presentation at SC Gallery in Bilbao in February, and another at Richard Heller in June.

“She’s capturing a certain zeitgeist,” Heller said in a phone call. “She’s injecting this new life into an age-old genre of portrait painting. And the images are just striking, too.”

González may be modernizing the fashion codes of classical painting, but she’s also emphasizing a longstanding relationship between the two. From the Renaissance onward, paintings often served as a vehicle for new sartorial styles as portraits went on display or traveled between courts. González isn’t attempting to capture trends, however, and focuses more on what a particular garment might bring to an image, she explained. “Quilted coats, athletic shirts or loose garments allow me to construct very sculptural figures.”

She added: “They’re very common items that almost everyone has owned or worn at some point, and that makes it possible for many people to see themselves reflected in them. That mix between the everyday and the monumental is what interests me most in translating to painting.”

In her shared studio space, González keeps a disciplined schedule, painting from photographs and keeping her favorite artists’ books close by as she works. Lately, she’s been thinking about the psychological power of Spanish painter Diego Velásquez’s masterwork “Portrait of Innocent X,” the searing papal portrait the artist made in 1650, which González recently visited in Rome. Heller, too, mentions the famed portrait when talking about her work, and the pope’s vibrant, status-projecting red cape — not unlike the voluminous puffer jacket in its voluminous shape, gleaming fabric and authoritative presence.

But Gonzalez’s favorite painting to stand in front of is Francisco de Zurbarán’s “The Virgin of the Caves” in Seville, in which a statuesque Virgin Mary, cloaked in resplendent red and blue, is flanked by cherubs and she blesses the kneeling monks around her. Gonzalez has referenced it directly in one of her paintings; she loves the 17th-century painter’s handling of fabrics, but Mary’s presence strikes her as well.

“She makes me think about a femininity that resists all the adversities of history,” she said. “It’s a painting that has accompanied me for years and that I return to almost like a ritual.”

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