Macarena Esperanza
This painting depicts Spanish Baroque sculptor Luisa Roldán's statue of La Macarena, the most venerated image of the Virgin Mary in Seville, Spain. The statue is referred to both as the Virgin of Hope of Macarena and our Lady of Sorrows. This double presence of sorrow and hope exemplifies the female cycle of suffering, and reference the grievance and piety of the Virgin Mary. It is a prominent piece in the celebration of the Seven Sorrows during Holy Week in Seville. Mary mourns the loss, crucifixion, and burial of her child, but the Friday of Sorrows is followed by Christ's Resurrection (Flack, 1980).
When Flack first saw the statue, she felt a strong female connection to the work despite her Jewish identity. She was drawn to the statue as an image that embodied the grieving mother. Flack transcended the religious associations of Mary as well as common stereotypes of Mary, viewing Mary instead of as a source of strength. She created this work to explore Mary's despondency as well as her own. For Flack, Mary's devastation over the death of her son served as the perfect platform to explore her own distress over her child's disability and move forward. The male father figure again plays a part in creating the sorrows of motherhood for both Mary and Flack (Baskind, 2009).
Whereas the Rape of Persephone is an internal revelation of emotional pain, Audrey Flack's hyper-representation of the statue of the crying Macarena Esperanza is one of external expression of sorrow, and of emotional affect. Although one must consider the significance of the aforementioned context of the painter's appropriation of the statue into one of the realm of the secular and the personal, the raw, bodily manifestation of sorrow (furrowed brows, crying, tears) transcends religiously and historically-informed symbols of suffering, and instead communicates a universal, physiological response to emotional pain. Therefore, in contrast to the internalized suffering of Persephone, Flack's visceral interpretation of the crying Virgin Mary is that of a cathartic process.