TAKING off from his 2012-18 painting titled The Bitch inspired by a Kool cigarettes print advertisement, this 2022 painting by de Veyra, titled Infanta Margarita Teresa in Pink Gym Wear (or, The Bitch 2), aimed to start a would-be series of view-from-the-behind portraits of kneeling female figures. Infanta is indeed another depiction of a kneeling female figure with its back to the viewer, acting as a less subtle representation of a dominatrix “bitch,” less subtle because this time the young woman in the picture is holding a whip. As in The Bitch, a white dog appears near the kneeling young woman figure, while a tablet computer on the floor echoes the vibrator held like a cellphone in the previous painting. The young woman/bitch in the present painting is wearing gym wear, as a variation on the denim and tight shirt combination in the earlier-mentioned painting as symbol for women’s global dress liberation.

    While The Bitch addressed the basic global problematics and contradictions around the slur “bitch” in general, Infanta carried some of those same concerns to what is here presented as a variation image on Diego Velasquez’s oft-painted infanta, Margaret Theresa of Spain (later Margaret Theresa of Austria), but with de Veyra here doing some anachronisms to create a new post-baroque, even post-colonial Asian-looking Infanta Margarita Teresa (complete with the attendant Habsburg jaw).

    The painting still carries feminist contexts, then, firstly around the infanta’s history (many didn’t want Margaret Theresa to retain her claim to the Spanish throne for being a woman, and then later she merely became a child-bearing machine, leading to her early death at the age of 21), then secondly, around the color pink (there is one feminist criticism, by Yueling Li, around Velasquez’s obsession with innocence and virginity in his portraits of the infanta).

    This time around, however, de Veyra’s Infanta offers two caveats to its feminism: one, in consideration of the fact that the infanta was part of an old monarchic order, the equivalent today of a plutocracy in many of the planet’s parts; and two, in cognizance of the fact that the Infanta actually became an anti-Semite at one point, a racist, in Leopold I’s Vienna. In contemporary terms, then, this throws de Veyra’s feminist concerns regarding female leadership mainly into the two sorts within the right-left political spectrum, or within the plutocratic representative democracy to participatory democracy spectrum, or into the two sorts of feminisms in the Sara Duterte-Leni Robredo political spectrum inside our own country in the early 2020s (this painting was painted for the 2022 pro-Leni-Robredo-presidential-campaign Let’s Pink Up the Pieces! online group show).