Artworks

CAPTION HERE

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Barnes’s Mona Lisa takes one of the most reproduced faces in art history and pushes it into a different register. The artist reimagines da Vinci’s iconic sitter as an eerie emerald apparition—her expression still serene, but her skin and surroundings bathed in an otherworldly radioactive glow. The original structure is still unmistakable—the folded hands, the three-quarter pose, the winding road and distant crags—but the familiar has become preternatural, as if the image had passed through a chemical or cinematic filter and emerged altered yet strangely intact. The yellowed sky and shadowed landscape feel more like a fever dream than an Italian vista, as though the whole scene were lit from within by some uncanny interior light. Barnes signs and dates the canvas in the corner, quietly claiming ownership of this altered icon—a vernacular Mona Lisa who has wandered out of the museum and into a more psychological, hallucinatory space, bringing her enigmatic smile along for the ride.