Errantes is a battle painting. From the genre the Baroque used to narrate conquests and enshrine the victors, it keeps the scale and the tenebrist light that cuts bodies out of a dark ground. Yet those doing the fighting come from cartoons, and the painting refuses to choose between the two registers: it holds them at the same temperature, with no hierarchy between the venerated and the banal.
The title names the stellae errantes, the seven bodies that, for the Romans, did not follow the turning of the heavens. All seven are in the battle, though not as heavenly bodies: each arrives in the form of the metal alchemy assigned to it, and that metal becomes the mask, helmet, crown or shield of a cartoon character.
In Latin, errare is first of all to wander. But whatever wanders does not return unchanged: at each crossing, from the sky into myth, from myth into alchemy and from alchemy into cartoons, the planets changed their names, their shapes and even their substance, a transmutation like the one alchemy sought in metals. Errare is also to go wrong, and the painting takes that risk: a cartoon character in a Baroque battle is, above all, a body out of place. Migration is what holds these meanings together. The errant bodies leave the vault of fixed stars, the order that gave each one its place and its rank, and along the way they mix with everything they meet.
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