Extremity of the West

(Extremity of the West author's title. The National Gallery events listing calls it 'The Unseen Story')

https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/events/friday-lates-the-unseen-story-12-12-2025

Extreme widescreen digital video, made especially for "The Big Screen" in the National Gallery's newly refurbished Sainsbury Wing entrance hall. The screen is 9 metres x 3 metres and the resolution is an enormous 12480x3240 pixels

Based on “The Family of Darius Before Alexander” by Paolo Veronese, c. 1565–1570
R&D Studio Ltd with The National Gallery’s NGX innovation programme.

Synopsis

In 1570 the artist Veronese playfully reframed a historical event. His painting of ‘Alexander the Great’ bestowing mercy upon the mother, wife and daughters of Darius, relocates the scene from the Persian desert in 333BCE to a fashionable Venetian square of his own era.

This new artwork updates the scene once more, this time to Trafalgar Square in 2025.

Summary of the creative approach and process

Under its NGX innovate programme the National Gallery ran workshops with ELEVATE; a group of young people from Tower Hamlets. The "Unseen Story" workshops focused on a number of paintings and then selected “The Family of Darius before Alexander” by Paulo Veronese.
After this phase, myself and Rachel Davies as R&D Studio were given the task of distilling the thoughts and impressions from the young people into a 90-second digital ‘film’ for the new large digital screen in the Sainsbury Wing Foyer.

The young critics had been fascinated by the fakeness, the gloss and the mischievous humour that Veronese had applied to a historical narrative, that was otherwise about conquest and Imperial power.

R&D Studio began a long process of tests exploring how to contemporise Veronese’s painting and how to add a layer of satire that echoed his playfulness.

This process led to the adoption of two approaches.

The first was to relocate the scene from a Venetian public Square to Trafalgar Square. There were obvious visual parallels in the architecture of both spaces. And Trafalgar Square accommodates a multitude of activities from tourism, to performances, to demonstrations which was perfect to include a panorama of ideas similar to Veronese’s interpretation. We created a moving-image digital collage containing over 200 layers.

The second and more controversial idea was to update individual characters in the painting to modern-day versions using A.I. The strange, slightly illogical and yet curiously generic figures that were produced by ‘artificial intelligence’ also included a slippery, glossy quality that seemed to us to echo Veronese’s highly glamorous portraits in his layered rendition.

https://www.rachelanddaniel.co/extremity-of-the-west

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