Although the subject of this painting is not named, the features of the sitter’s face resemble those of one of Jose Lerma’s favorite people to paint: Charles II of Spain. Lerma has painted the face with giant brush marks, using solid fields of heavily layered medium stacked atop a background lines with doodles. The effect is a picture that looks simultaneously childish and bold. Lerma’s giant marks are designed to make adult viewers feel smaller in the presence of his paintings. He wants to disarm viewers so that they can appreciate the works on a direct level, as colorful pictures, before going too deeply into trying to apply a bigger meaning to the work. The medium he used for this work—pigmented silicone caulk—is another way of infusing a sense of everyday life into the painting, taking something mundane and inexpensive and using it to paint the portrait of someone influential and powerful from history. Lerma’s portraits are frequently modeled after people who had political or economic power, such as bankers, economists, and kings. The history of this type of portraiture is full of painters who sought to enlarge the fame of their subjects, exalting them with gloriously painted portraits. Lerma turns these same sitters into simplified, diminished fodder for paintings that are more about the paint than the subject matter. He reveals the absurdity of the art historical lineage he is now part of, while also taking it somewhere fresh.