Trust me and let’s embark on this journey together. White is a hug of people, between people. An embrace of places, between places.

White Duran Project is the storytelling, made of images and sounds, of the last six years of Barbara Duran’s artistic life from 2016 to
2021-; there are four cycles of which this project is composed: White,
Appearing through invisible, SERVAE. Liquid icons, IS -LAND.

The former Cartiera Latina, in Rome, hosts the White exhibitions; it is a place that carries with it a soundtrack made up of chirping birds and the sound of the flowing water of the Almone river, from which the whole structure is caressed for its length. The Nagasawa Hall, the nucleus of the former paper mill and the beating heart for the primary function of hosting all the production machines, is the place of our exhibition. The magnificence of the space was the starting point and inspiration for our set up: the high roofs, equipped with beams, and the depth of the roo-m seemed to us at Studio Urbana the ideal factors for creating a ship on which to board all together and abandon ourselves until the end of the Journey.

The stern of our ship welcomes visitors with six large canvases that are part of the White cycle, in which the emotional charge of the sign and the strength of the colors confirm the majesty already declared by the size of the work.

Proceeding, we find ourselves in front of sixteen works on rice paper, such a delicate and subtle material appear almost like an oxymoron with what is depicted: each paper carries with it the image of a woman. Women of all ages, ethnicities and shapes. Severe, gentle, sweet, lost looks. They evoke stories of women, mothers, warriors. It’s an amazing “army” of women, sanctioned not only by the depiction but also by the setting. Each silhouette is inscribed inside a niche, resembles a uterus. The birth. Metamorphosis.

Inside the niches placed laterally we find a polyptych of five works on paper. The contrast between the protagonists of these works is interesting: we have just left a group of very composed women, and framed in their own well-defined space to get to a dance that transmits openness and dynamism, a trait that wants to get out of the sheet and a dance that could extend throughout the perimeter of the hall. The gaze abandons the sky for a few minutes. We enter a world until now unexplored, the digital. A screen is inside of a box.

A silhouette, a veil, water, sand or maybe rocks. The image is not pure. The sound is obsessive, even gloomy, dense. A soft voice arrives. An orchestra of faces follows, placed on the floor. Our eyes dance from a wooden panel to the other; the artist through the eyes presents to the viewers faces, stories, moods that come to life along every single wood grain. The Power of This Multitude human precedes the great wave of IS land. Let’s look up again. We sail among the wooden boards, we bounce in the light cotton of the canvas. We see the land, we enjoy the sea and look at the sky. IS land is color, matter. They are places, journeys. It’s the world. Every single color has a breath.

Thanks to a deeper dialogue I had with the artist, I indulged my curiosity in understanding the origin of the name White; the reflection was fascinating. White is light and is, in Eastern traditions, even mourning. White is circular. Time is circular. White is not a definite moment: past, present, future. Everything coexists. We all coexist. SERVAE. Icone Liquide find some very solid roots in this circularity. Servae is the one who guards, cares. With the word icons the artist wanted to give life to archaic figures that, however, represent a contemporary archetype; liquid, they do not have material substance but are bodies that come from the earth. Nourishment.

Appearing through invisible comes from the very concept of appearing through invisible. The figures are there. They are not there. The use of silverpoint, an alchemic material whose colour almost blend with that of paper. The gaze becomes the representation of a human passage. This is what icon/worl a means. IS land is the place. The place for which embark on a journey. Is land because it is a landing place.

At the end of our dialogue, Barbara Duran quotes Lady Macbeth’s words to King Duncan […] My hands are of your colour, but I shame to wear a heart so white […]

As Javier Marías writes, “such a white is not possessed by those who are blameless, but by those who have not been infected by the words and from the faults of others”.

Silvia Savoca, Torino 25.07.2021