BARBARA DURAN

To talk about Barbara Duran’s recent paintings (that is, mainly, works of the last three years), is to talk of an artist of various contrasting interests (see for example some of her illustrative paintings, as the recent “Tuareg Tales”: not illustrations as we generally intend, but real excerpts of painting). We should briefly consider one of her more extensive paintings and in some way, more intense and problematic: Deposition 2.

As soon as we have visited the studio, this painting among the others, has, indeed unconsciously, attracted our attention. There is in it something with the capacity to generate and to reveal. A revelation of disposition, above all, which is evident thanks to a tension towards the rhythmical conception of a synthetic yet cryptic narrative; an idea of matter which in itself summarizes all other elaboration of the painter: a subject capable of living in the fluidity and in the density, in the mass as in the sensation of the skin; a score of composite levels with a ” taste” for the geometric: see how in the vertical line, for example, the painting is combined through four chromatic levels, determined in as many forms; the formal and linear encasing, which in the figure, evokes the ellipse and therefore, again a rhythmic geometry, contradicting the dominant horizons.

The painting, in short, has caught our attention, seeming even to stimulate from and in the memory something which is, however, a vague thought not completely capable of narrowing itself into a definite image (what nonetheless found its collocation between Secession and Expressionism).
Even because we thought it to be a mere and punctual “quotation”, this kind of memory would be a solution beyond its own time. Instead this time is experienced by Barbara Duran.

Provided that we understand it, of course, as a moment which encompasses, obviously, history and actuality. Or better said: as a moment which in and from its actuality does not rule out the thought of history, yet carries it on by sedimentation.
Thus the impression of awareness of “history” has little by little established itself, once we abandoned every other consideration and mnemonic survey of that painting, turning our attention towards other works: some diptychs (Reversed, Diptych, Diptych) and triptych ( Bogarin ) , for example, as towards others conceived horizontally, and measured by “apportions” where we find, through symbolic accentuations, some enunciations of the experienced ( In reflection ).

In the same way the thought of an actuality has been established, whereas for the horizontal compositions the conception of “dais” can be evoked: so, a multiple image but homogenous in terms of narration, can equally be evoked – and here we have the concept of sedimentation, which in itself contains each evolution – the concept of sequence, and also that of “simultaneity”, without dispersing the reality of the visual input.
These are paintings which can, only by misinterpreting the real significance, be considered as existential “annotations”. This concept must not be completely excluded: besides, painting is based also on “annotations” and it is, often, an annotation, on the condition of reciprocity between author and reality, between author and thought. In any case thought reflects on itself, and from itself emerges a condition properly experienced or, in other ways, “wished for”. Thus all together and in their thematic diversity (visible to the outsider, surely not for who conceives the image), those “fragments” form a sense of a complex “idiom”, for which of course the “temporal” of what follows is evoked, obviously as a whole in the memory. Thus plurality in unity.

For the composition of the “diptych” and “triptych” the reasoning is, in a sense, “diverse” yet not totally “dissimilar”. We might believe that primarily it’s the image which needs its own space, to be able to exist. In the same way that this assumption could be confirmed in the predominant thematic. Men and women mainly ( Figures ) . Subjects which need their own place, even in the mutual union and in terms of life, (not without reason has Duran adopted the term “monads” for a “cycle” of another thematic). Paradoxically then, the union really exists in the space that separates them ( Diptych ) . From here, and for what affects the generality of the images, a reflection that concerns us, one could say philosophically, the concept of existentiality (“{…} as if our own narrative – she writes – our being here, our appearance, (not in an exterior but in an interior way) would signify all along “in fieri”, (a becoming) because it is {…}.

Existentiality for which however one does not make reference, as often happens, to a dramatic power, (at least when not considered inherent in the principle of existence). On the contrary it would seem that Duran keeps herself equally distant from it and its opposite.
In the end, her fundamental interest is not aimed at the reasons of the narrative, but of becoming the painting of the narrative. And here is, as we mentioned before, the elaboration of matter; the conception of spaces, the composite stabilities. Observing, for example, the harmonious accents of light and shadows, we see how the “volumetric” intentions determine the physicality of a body ( Inverted ).

Brush strokes, often bitter, slithering on a wooden support which absorbs the colour.

Domenico Guzzi

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In Reflection
For Barbara Duran

The boat takes off on the canal along horizontal journeys.
From the quay a man follows its course.
The lighthouse cuts the sky vertically, The ways interwine; space is put on a cross, coasts, sandy shores, skies swollen with clouds, fjords: the north of the mind.
All times it’s the bodies that rise along their narrow banks, a body paired to the other. The orthogonal space redoubles in its reflection, guides the painter in the mirrored world.
In reflection, is a title written by Barbara. It invites me to ponder. I follow the worldy persuasion, abandoning space. Or better said, space solidifies in a few images preserved in the mind.

We verticals, on the terraces on the castle of Sermoneta, in an uncertain past of our youth. Alex in front of the horizontal walls of the Lepini. His friendship and the joyful lavishness of his gifts. I have seen the paintings Barbara, his daughter, kept.
To say that I find again in Barbara’s paintings an echo of those by her father, means that time can, sometimes, solidify in space, cradle itself within a double image, fill the worldly emptiness and renew itself in reflection.

Ruggero Savinio
Rome, january 18, 2007

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About: In Reflection (frame 1-2-3-4 ). Summer 2006

“The notion of a work as a group of works, a canvas as an implication of other canvases around it, has become so fundamental to the artist that even an isolated painting becomes a particular case of the whole. In fact, the series of moments that lead to another can concern different canvases that can all be learned and compared, but which are already inserted in any case, in the definitive state of each one, which recovers them, thus affirming an absolute supremacy, of which it is nonetheless possible to certify the existence and preserve the memory, as the artist does, with photographs or films”
Michel Butor – Essays on painting

“Living cinema is like making a movie of one’s life (…) Yet cinema is not life…but in certain moments it can replace it, like a photo, like a memory.
Jean-Luc Godard – Interview

The only true journey (…) would be not to go towards new landscapes, but to have other eyes, to see the universe with the eyes of another, to see the thousand universes that everyone sees, that everyone is. Thus Proust ended his journey through Time, with an observation that seemed to allude to a representation within the representation.(…)
Roland Barthes – The Clear Room

The three quotations placed in the premise are perfectly relevant to the series of paintings that Duran presents in the quadruple sequence executed very recently and presented for the first time in the studio in Via Urbana, and which opens a new possible investigation into the artist’s return to the figurative and attempts to give a less nuanced reading that is more in keeping with the whole of the latest, but not the very latest, works that have been made since the last three years. The novelty, in a certain way, until today, hesitated, perhaps consists in an approach to an element that in the works created, had only been touched, with an almost fearful wandering around of not being able to close the road again with the effort undertaken; in the abandonment of a practice that had only occasionally distanced the concretization of the informal accomplishment. This element of novelty is undoubtedly Time, or rather its laceration in the acts and in the moment of stasis that realizes the pictorial moment, figurative and otherwise, crushing itself in the fixity and in the consequent silence. In the sequence time is rarefied; it is a background that remains and remains violated by the emergence of figures and objects, never secondary, which gradually, linking together, enliven the consequentiality. Citing, in contrast, the cinematic sequence shot is inevitable. Contrast evidently enriched by the fixed image which is the basis of the pictorial specificity and is sometimes, due to bad luck, its constraint. We are at the impassable limit, perhaps, but also looking for the fusion of the two fundamental elements, movement and time. In the final part of the last rectangle, in the coruscating color of darkness, time realizes its essential and unstoppable continuity, the color makes it concrete, now closing a series of images of solar brightness that from time to time fit together in the whites and in the pinks, penetrating, in harmony, into Time.

Rolando Culluccini

I start taking into consideration this last cycle, beyond its continuous flow, extremely consistent, without having decided beforehand, even in the analysis. As if in our own narrative, our being here, our appearance, (not in an exterior but an interior way) would signify all along “in fieri”, (a becoming), because it is.

The use of the notion of the soul is conditioned by recognizing that a certain set of operations and events, precisely psychic or spiritual, should be the manifestations of an autonomous principle, invincible for its originality to other realities, although related to them.
Less important is the fact that the soul is bodiless or has the same composition of bodily things, as its materialistic solution is often equally well-grounded, as its opposite, acknowledging the soul as substance.

Surely in pursuing that instant, fixed, blocked, unique, that instant which contains the whole, I try to convey, with the most extreme “physicality” that substance belonging to the human being.
The duality body/soul which is the essence of life. In stillness and in motion.
I block the whole in the reflected image.

In the world the soul is the highest reality or, sometimes, the same organized principle and ruler of the world. Even the composite, chromatic, iconographic structure turns towards this.
The necessity of expressing the vital instant containing the set of infinite instants which animate life. Yet, at the same time, expressing symbolically the physical, psychic and spiritual action and being. The aspiration to transcend.

According to Aristotle, the soul is the body’s substance. She is defined as the final and former act (eutalachia) of a body whose power is life. The soul rests in the body as the act of vision rests in the visual organ: it’s the fulfilment of capabilities belonging to an organic body.
As act and activity the soul is FORM and as FORM and SUBSTANCE, in one of the three determinations of substance which can be either the form or the matter or the composite of form and matter.

Thus the image/icon repeating an act, a non act. One resulting from the other as stills/form of the life of a unique being in relation to the infinite.
Windows/Monads containing everything, autonomous mirrors of life’s moments.

IN REFLECTION

Barbara Duran
Summer 2006