Napoleonic Seal
Size: 16x20"
Date Originally created: Spring 1979
Medium: Oil on Canvas

In January 1979, Acevedo moved back to Los Angeles to attend Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He and his brother, Eric, took up residence in a little two-bedroom apartment located behind a front house on Elm Street in the City of Alhambra. The location was chosen for its proximity to Art Center which was about a 25 minute drive away. It was here that he painted the oil on canvas called Napoleonic Seal. This was his first painting to use a tessellated overlay on figuration as inspired by his perceptual experience at the Alhambra, in Spain. The periodic pattern can be seen on the three "extraterrestrials" in the lower right corner of the composition. Embedded in the head of the right-hand alien is a familiar array of cubic blocks known from psychological perception studies of convex / concave phenomena and also from Salvador Dali's painting, The Skull of Zubaran.

Acevedo: This Neo-Surrealist work is very loosely based on Leonardo's Last Supper but this features an effigy of a pagan animal-like god. If you interpret the seal's fins as the corners of a hat - then the figure at the center of the table is a conquering imperial hero. If you read the corners of the hat as fins then it is a victimized Seal lying prostrate on its dry-docked Waterloo - as it was in its original source image. It seemed an apt metaphor for the bitter-sweet paradox of human experience and the fate of some of our greatest saints.