The Prado Museum opens its doors to Residente and Silvia Pérez Cruz with the transformation of “Las meninas” into a music stage | Culture

When the Louvre opened the doors to Beyoncé and Jay Z in 2018 to stage the video clip Monkey shit, the Prado Museum would be no less. On March 15, Puerto Rican singer and composer resident René Pérez joined singer Silvia Pérez Cruz and violinist Noemí Gasparini to prostrate before them Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez and release a new, live recorded version of one of his latest hits, released this Monday. 313in its original video clip Penélope Cruz and which garners seven million views on YouTube.

The video begins with Residente among four dancers acting as a singing choir in the legendary Sala 12, after which their verses begin to sound, taking advantage of the silence without visitors in one of the busiest places in Madrid. The song, a tribute to her friend Valentina Gasparini, who died in 2022, is then moved to the Central Gallery, where Silvia Pérez Cruz continues her part of the song alongside it The Adoration of the Magi by Rubens. Culture Minister Ernest Urtasun shared the five-minute video on X and emphasized that “a scenario like this represents another level.” The museum itself has described it as “a hymn to the beauty of the ephemeral in the face of the immortality of art.”

This “intimate” version of the song, as the Prado Museum describes it, is a new initiative by the Madrid art gallery in its strategy to increase its visibility on social networks through other arts and collaborations, as it did with the release of the video in February acts of The power of artby Robe Iniesta, accompanied by paintings from the museum that recalled what he said in the song; or Eduardo Guerrero’s most recent flamenco dance before Garden of Delights of the woods. The fact that one of the musicians with the most Latin Grammys is now taking part (21 with Calle 13 and five more solo) is a step further in this direction. Resident, recalls the institution, will offer concerts in Spain on September 14th at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona and a day later, on the 15th, at the Wizink Center in Madrid.