Kehinde Wiley explains the vulnerability of his subjects’ poses in the Down series:

“Those paintings were about fallen heroes and fallen soldiers, fallen religious figures, and those moments of repose had less to do with power and dominance in presence but rather its inverse, and that contributed to the resonance.”

In his own work, Wiley says “There’s something decidedly homoerotic about it, given that it’s one man deciding to choose another man for aesthetic reasons to be idealized into a large-scale painting.”