When she abandoned hope in her daily life, Kahlo embedded her despair within paintings, which, by virtue of their very existence, act as the artist's envoys in search of salvation, or something like it.
At times archaizing and romantic, at times brutally immediate, Kahlo's subjects impose stasis on history, freezing together the ancient past with living memories.
It is a practice as much shamanic as artistic, one related to the concept of Aztec duality and addressed in other terms as well.
Two immediate similarities to the Velazquez painting