I have known Barbara for a long time. But as you well know there are various types of connections: emotional connection, friendship connection, artistic connection, familiar connection. I believe I have them all. So forgive me if the various “connections” frequently overlap in my critical discourse.

Let’s start from afar … by saying that in this continuous and incessant artistic re-proposal of our times, especially after (but it is not yet over) Pandemic Life (Vita Pandemica), Art has been among the expressions the one that has suffered the most. The market is looking for its own continuity, its own raison d’être, and many artists, whom I have the pleasure of knowing, have experienced moments of great emotional suffering. Expression, the outward communication of an internal process, often experiences rifts and second thoughts.

Barbara’s White Project (which I’ll focus on today), however, originated a long way back since it was first exhibited in 2016. It is a cognitive and personal journey that has deep roots and that has evolved, unfolded, I dare say, in consecutive stages from Dwellings of Time (Dimore del Tempo) in 2009 to the Is-land series of 2020/21. I am going to start by taking my cue from what I read from her website:

“The White Project is dedicated to all those who flee wars, injustice, torture. To women, mothers, sisters, men, brothers, children. To all living beings who suffer and have the right to live. It is dedicated to our sisters and to our Brothers”.

This statement instantly draws me back to two concepts that are particularly close to my heart and that I would like to share with you today.

When we look at the paintings (or better at the icons that, at times, can be traced back to her personal history), we notice that the Artist (Barbara) from a “reproduction” of the surrounding world (a typical concept until the 1800s) moves on to a “reproduction”/translation of an internal world oftentimes linked to a “Spiritual” experience of existence.

In this case I consider the work of art  (the image)  as the  communica- tion of a story to the outside world that the Artist,  the Shaman, shares with the viewer, and, when I speak of “Spiritual” I do not mean a  religious act, but rather Spiritual in the fullest sense of the term.

According to Edward Casey’s definition, an image is not just content we see, but a way we see. The feelings associated with the aesthetic experience are not opposed to those felt in real life, and the emotions elicited will operate cognitively when they are set in conjunction with each other. This assertion, which I find valid for my type of reading of the WHITE series today, ties into another concept that I find to be pertinent and that I would like to highlight.

Twentieth-century art is deliberately anti-religious but deeply spiritualistic. This is the case, for example, of Robert Rauschenberg with his little puppet shows produced at the end of the 1940s, of the last century, in which various pieces of African, Moroccan origin are approached more or less like an Ex Voto (a Votive Offering).

Each piece tells a story and when brought together they provide the viewer with an overall emotion. The real object, in this way, dematerializes, becomes incorporeal, without turning into something imaginary or unreal, and the space of the painting becomes the space of duality, both of presence and of absence, of History and of the Sacred.

But let us ask ourselves, “is there an artistic quest around the invisible, the eternal, that which lies beyond the real?”

I really believe so. And Barbara knows it well. In this case (don’t be surprised!) I read the WHITE series as ex-votos (votive offerings)!!!

Whether we are religious, spiritual, or totally atheist we are surrounded by the theme of the ex-votos (votive offerings), because we are “conditioned” by the modality of giving, of asking, of thanking, of ingratiating, of witnessing, as we ourselves are both subjects and objects of the witnessing.

Barbara, in her artistic evolution (“artist as work in progress”) felt the need to share these icons that have been a part of her life.

Spirituality and Ex-Voto (Votive Offerings): two interpreting keys that I want to offer you today.

Let’s go back to WHITE and to my interpretation. On the one hand there is the objective historical aspect of the story, on the other there is the spiritual dimension, the relationship, the detachment, the objectification of the figure represented. Upon a more careful reading, the pair widens: on the one hand there is the memory of the event, and therefore the historical fact, on the other hand the desire to pay homage to the “deep personal involvement” that this image brings with it, so much so that it becomes a “spiritual” experience. Memory is therefore only the starting point that becomes lost in the creation of the pictorial space, and the artist is “homo-humanus” par excellence, because he clings to that love that resembles that which the wise ancients called Soul and tries to capture it in a small wooden tablet (or on a canvas).

Barbara’s journey is an intimate, emotional, and educational one. It is almost as if the artist devoted herself to painting by drawing on an inner analysis, a sort of Freudian (??) / Jungian (??) psychological journey. Surprised? ! My interpretation definitely is a transversal analysis.

The task of the historian, and of the art historian in particular, is precisely that of renewing, explaining, deducing, and reinterpreting certain themes, and I believe that a transverse analysis is one of the new ways of approaching the understanding of art.

In fact, one of the dangers is that the process of contemporary scientific and dynamic modernization can lead to the erasing of the past. But I believe that the true Artist is the one who translates a set of images into sensations.Unfortunately, the difficulties with understanding images are partly due to language. Unfortunately, we have only one word “image” to refer to sequential images, perceptual images, dreamlike images, and metaphorical ideas expressed in images. The Artist-Shaman (I know, I really like the juxtaposition!) is the one who turns an image into an idol, by transporting it from the ‘territory of the uncontrollable’ to the ‘territory of certainty’. The word-images, contained in Barbara’s works, are one of the proofs of what we are affirming.

What is indisputably certain is that the Artist does not seek, in his first expression, other than to proclaim his reality: a reality sometimes whispered, sometimes shouted, sometimes imposed, sometimes sinuously declared in the proposition of a different truth that opens a parallel dimension of understanding of what is real. Where the Artist torn, nowadays more than ever, between doing and enduring, performs a constant mediation and interaction with the outside world, a mutual adjustment of the individual and the environment, an interaction of sensations and reflections, to emphasize his act of witnessing. But there is more: the value of memory is never separated from contemplation: contemplation of the past (with all due distance) and contemplation of the instant lived in the present, the entirety stirs (sometimes unexpectedly in the viewer), the sudden spark of a different vision.

We must not give this word ‘contemplation’ a passive meaning but a completely active one because it is the contemplative spirit that moves us to notice and explore the dark presences in our personal history.

What remains of memory is a slow wave that carries with it all the flavor of a season, but no longer its forms, not even the shadow of the shadow, but only the infinite “negative” of those remembered  forms, and the limited though indefinite “positive”: such as to make the painting an apparition. Can a pictorial form have the value of an apparition?

Yes!

Often, Barbara’s work is a container of “universal” meanings (hence the dedication I quoted at the beginning) that go beyond the visible, and the “symbol” remains the only door, the only way to access the parallel universe of dreams, of archetypes; all immersed in a cognitive flow that does not refer to the intellect but to sentiment and to the collective unconscious (and here I would just like to mention her last series dedicated to IS-LAND, of high symbolic value).

An art that finds its vitality precisely from contamination, from looking at its back and to its sides, from facing with courage and determination the search for a material and mystical essence that always hovers over her works.

To evoke this paradoxical but visible simultaneity, for Barbara the canvas is intended as an atmospheric space, where the visible and material of the past coexist in a simultaneous paradox, with the invisible and intangible of the present always in constant, vibrant dialogue. And where Spirituality, Contemporaneity, Courage, Historical Presence, and Passion are incessantly composed. If I hadn’t seen what Barbara has created next, I would wish her to move on, but the following series is tangible evidence of a profound and never-ending quest.

Renato Miracco
Washington DC, July 3, 2021

Reference Texts:

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J. 1957.
Arnold Hauser, in his “Social History of Art” (Sozialgeschichte der Kunst and Literaturen, C. H. Beck, München 1951-1953.
Edward S. Casey, Toward a Phenomenology of imagination,
Journal of the British Society Phenomenology, London, 1974.
James Hillman, The Thought of the Heart, Insel, Frankfurt, 1981.
James Hillman, Anima Mundi: The Return of the Soul to the World, An Annual of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought, Dallas, 1982.