Barbara Duran elaborates in small slips of paper the natural element with grace and obsession, together with a cultural awareness of ancient Italian ancestry. Giotto like hills or assumed fourteen century polyptych, they are strained by a conscience restlessly modernized, in the search of a beloved nature, wounded, dreamed of, with an eye as the center of light, through fragments endowed with their own independent life. Yet cadenced by a series of references and echoes, ready to compose themselves in a cosmic image. (…)

Let us look at them, these forms defined by bent horizons, surrounded by a light which expands in skies humored by the softness of profiles suddenly grown darker. Lands that don’t speak of joy, but are encased in a bare essentiality and in some way an aching. No exuberance in a nature sensed as drained entity, perhaps a stage for far away storms, now calm again, yet inhabited by a grume, inevitably tormented, and a fatal concurrence of cosmic events.
On the big canvases which conclude the artist’s work, a dazzling luminous body, ectoplasmatic, surrounded by shadow, as if still shielded in the obscure womb of which dreams are made of.

Maria Teresa Benedetti