The Prado Museum opens its doors to Residente and Silvia Pérez Cruz with ‘Las meninas’ converted into a musical stage

If the Louvre opened the doors to Beyoncé and Jay Z in 2018 to stage the video clip Apeshit, the Prado Museum was not going to be less. On March 15, the Puerto Rican singer and composer Residente, René Pérez, joined the singer Silvia Pérez Cruz and the violinist Noemí Gasparini to prostrate in front of Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez and release a new version recorded live – which was published this Monday – of one of his latest hits, 313in whose original video clip Penélope Cruz also appeared and which has accumulated seven million views on YouTube.

The video begins with Residente among four dancers, who serve as a vocal choir, in the iconic Sala 12, after which their verses begin to play, 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 with her part of the song alongside The adoration of the magi by Rubens. The Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, shared the five-minute video on X, highlighting that “a scenario like this is 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 boost its visibility on social networks through other arts and collaborations, as they did when launching in February the video of The power of artby Robe Iniesta, accompanied by paintings from the museum that appealed to what he said in the song; or Eduardo Guerrero’s recent flamenco dance in front of the Garden of delights of the Woods. That one of the musicians with the most Latin Grammys now participates (21 with Calle 13 and five more solo) is a step further in this direction. Resident, remembers the institution, will offer concerts in Spain on September 14 at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona and a day later, on the 15th, at the Wizink Center in Madrid.