Art Curator and Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, in New York
All that I see becomes for me form and “state of mind”.
At times even I see those referable forms that people perceive in my paintings.
(….) The painting is not the first object to hit the eye…it’s what is concealed behind it.
I am not interested in “abstracting” or extracting things, or taking the painting back to the drawing, the form, the line or the colour.
The way I paint allows me to continue inserting things repeatedly in the painting: drama, pain, anger, love, a body, a horse, my idea of space.
Through the eyes of the observer these things become ideas or emotions.”
Willem De Kooning, “Notes on Art”,1957
I have known Barbara for a very long time.
We have shared, dreamt, hoped to rebuild, to track down through dance, ancient civilizations and disused modalities of communication. I remember giving her as a present a small jade female dancer, of which I have the male version, indeed to emphasize this timeless bond which connected us.
Life passes and flows and in Constantin Kavafis’ words, “takes us to unknown and unheard-of havens.
Yet in Barbara’s latest production I find a new a bond, a search, at times obsessive, but never a means to itself, of Memory.
Memory as a daily methodology, as an exercise of living and as a heritage to pass on the two meanings of Personal Memory and historical Memory.
Indeed we always see in Barbara the will to teach us a course, to indicate a way, to guide us, even where at times we are stubborn, on her path, towards her Memory, towards her Truth.
Not by chance I wish to recall the lines of Ezra Pound, grandfather of our dear Patrizia, who today wanted to dedicate a poem to this exhibition, lines that say, (forgive me, I quote from memory)
“What thou lovest well remains,
The rest is dross,
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage…..” (Canto LXXXI)
Our heritage is something we do not leave behind, but we live by it every day, in the flow of the seasons, in the course of our daily decisions, in the burdens we decide to abandon on the side of the road or to carry on our shoulders.
Heritage is life And our artist is very clear about that.
Duran’s alphabet, even if her first figurative works are remarkable, (and I own a few) is born from the abstractionism, with the identification of emotional pathways and the principles of reality’s perception, reaching the definition of a language based on the expressive and symbolic function of colour and on the rhythm produced by mutual relations of pure forms. Can a pictorial form also have a value of appearance? Definitely so in our case.
Barbara, confronting some of the emotions, arranging and in some way representing, is in fact compelled, sometimes through drastic steps, to transform these emotions and ideas into new forms or to delineate these forms so that their coherence and their independent value would be equal or greater than that of the elements which create them and from which they derive.
The emotional form Barbara suggests must not be considered as a mere wrapping: it has “the genius of inaccuracy”, it changes continually, it springs from a transformation or is preparing the next one.
The formal inherent relation is not the one between the image and the things reproduced, but the one which intervenes between the images and a visual emotion gathered in its totality and by which at times we are bewildered for its intensity.
This way the real given dematerializes itself, becoming disembodied, and the space of the painting becomes the space of duality, as much as of the presence as of the absence.
The figure, as we see in today’s exhibited works, illustrative of a long journey, emerges, floats, sinks into a perpetual becoming.
Sign and image, in her work, are at the beginning the same thing which the conscience turns into two different directions.
But there can also be an imposition of the sign on behalf of the image, depriving it of any semantic content.
Or else, in the opposite case, the possibility of isolating the object of the phenomenal world, and to force it to undergo a process where there is no fulfilment, so as to proceed either to a sign , or to a sign-image .
This can be seen for example in the large polyptych “Forma Corporeitatis” where hers is a lesson following a reduction of the elements of line and colour to the essential, trying to represent the essence of reality, instead of its exact natural appearance.
Or still in the ” Monadi” where the intimate relation between the sign and the “dream”, meant as another place, becomes familiar and essential.
If the dream, word to mark the boundary of a timeless place in the painting, is lived as a place of an operating and crucial subjectivity, then for Barbara, drawing, painting, writing the dream or securing and crystallizing the sign, is at the same time an exercise of awareness and of imaginative appeal which becomes pure flowing in the short yet intensely packed film which accompanies the exhibition.
And not by chance have I quoted De Kooning at the beginning of this brief introduction, because what he declares is a wish I direct to my friend Barbara from the bottom of my heart.
“More and more love, pain, anger, in your painting and… make us follow you…..!!!!!”
With affection,
Renato
New York, 14/2/09
by BARBARA DURAN
Forma corporeitatis
(a las madres)
Don’t leave me
“Dear God
Free us from to-morrow’s care…
Dear God
There would be no idea of power without the idea of a future; the conscience would not be free of blame.
Dear God
Let us live as the birds in the sky and the lilies of the fields”.
Pier Paolo Pasolini
(from “Trasumanar e organizzar” prayer on Commission)
One thought characterizes this last cycle, the driving force of my whole work: homage to the power of sufferance and to the courage of life.
The physical pain, the pain of loss, of separation.
The pain of those who have dignity and strength and therefore are annihilated.
ICONE/MYTH that saves, regenerates, attends, predicts, weaves and gives birth, gives life therefore losing it, killed by those she/he has saved, protected and in companionship, revealing.
The pain of those who will always be annihilated because they have the power, the will and the courage to open doors and windows that can’t be opened.
Chinks instantly concealed.
Oh light I don’t see anymore
That before you had been in some
Way mine, now you shed light on me for
The last time.
I have returned
Life ends where it begins.
(King Oedipus, dialogues in “The rules of an illusion” quote p. 158)
A profound reference to the essence of life/death, the flow of life with its succeeding stages as the image of places/non places, images following each other and passing in succession as seen from the window of a train carriage.
The large polyptych “Forma corporeitatis (à las madres)” is dedicated to the “worthy mothers of the desaparecidos, those women who with their bodies and their presence have filled the emptiness left by their absences”:
Desaparecidos, in a more literary sense: all those in Latin America who, at the time of the past bloody dictatorships have disappeared, in many cases never found again and all those in a further past or in our dramatic present and in the future (as it is evident, and alas it will be) have disappeared, disappear and will disappear at the hand of the violence of others, because of oppression, abuse and the inevitable result of regimes and of wars which systematically eliminate those who fight for freedom and the dignity of living.
Many images, of the pictorial works and even more than the film, particularly abstract, rarefied, visionary, are rich imageries of the profound unawareness of being.
Without therefore a necessary psychoanalytical reading, rather an attempt to drag along those who will be moved and will find them attuned to their own sensitivity… the flow of life, the passing of days, of seasons, of colours and places. To leave and know how to let go those who won’t be able to stay at our side, physically, but only in recollection. To meet those who will be at our side for part of our life, as a tree, a mountain…. The window leaning towards the valley, where birds sing. Generate life, never imprisoning the soul of one’s own children, rather walking along with them, acknowledging their limpid gaze, vast and forever amazed and never hinder or divert their course.
Brush strokes which narrate, yet also made of acid tones… continuous
deferments revealing and instantly concealed in an enveloping/pursuing of pathos and tenderness, Eros and sufferance, myth and nature and then only the flow of “feeling” as skilfully evoked in “Daring light”, words dedicated to this last cycle by Patrizia de Rachewiltz.
Knowing how to enjoy the silence of the images and the music of echoes only filmed and maybe never existing… which anyhow belong to the past and the past is no more, I am, you are, and we are the result of it, so that we too become the past, living in the memory…of others and then others…in continuous mirrored relationships.
The thought that goes along with much of this last work wants to be also a signal, personal of course, of a changing of views…as if leaning from another window, trying to enter from another door.
Life is a prism…many-faced, of innumerable colours and scents: from the brackish colour of sea and oceans to the turgid colour of earth, from the acrid scent of blood and death to the silent and muffled scent of snow, from the fragrance of flowers to the intense odour of animals…we tread on the same innumerable paths and look at the infinite shades of sky and clouds.
We are all this.
The transformation consists in detaching one self and thus, paradoxically, in the profound experience of the world which allows acceptance.
The acceptance which, paradoxically, allows us the struggle, the integrity, the ethics and the compassion. The dignity of living which, at least for a while, allows us to accept the end of living: death.
He who has trampled across poppy fields and watched the ocean, he who has known how to love his own parents and his own children, to defend his own friends, to respect himself and his self-esteem, without stereotypes and without hypocrisy, will feel nostalgic of all this but shall never have regrets and will always look ahead… walk on unfamiliar roads with curiosity and courage, without being too afraid.
Barbara Duran
Bagnoregio, January 2009
Stabat Mater dolorosa iuxta crucem lacrimosa dum pendebat Filius…
I have found again the intensely dramatic words by Iacopone da Todi and the deep musicality of Pergolesi when I saw for the first time Forma corporeitatis (à las madres), the polyptych Barbara Duran dedicated to the Mothers of Plaza de Majo, to the victims of abuse, violence and oppression: this is her civil oration, with a profound character and a solemn holy composition. Frames of a drama of our times, in which the concerted nature and the representation’s movement offer the synthesis between pain and kindness, consolation and compassion, rebellion and resignation. A modern poem of sufferance in which, then as today, the Mothers carry the weight of sacrifice and of life’s contradictions, in which there is no more room for tears, but only for the dignity of the testimony, that which has seen disappear (yesterday in Argentina) and die (today in the ongoing conflict between Palestine and Israel) their own sons in front of their eyes.
White. Mourning.
A white kerchief tied around the head, a reminder of the first nappy used for their new-born, this is the symbol of the Mothers of Plaza de Majo. White is the ribbon revealing by its movements the violent attacks against women. A “white ache” – a “milky sea” – envelops the characters of “Cecità” (Blindness) in which José Saramago “exposes with vivid imagery and harsh accents the ethic’s night in which we have sunk”. An epidemic where miraculously a woman remains immune, a woman whose gesture of love becomes “the possibility to give back to man a common hope, and it will be her task to invent an itinerary of salvation, to recuperate the reasons of a united compassion”.
White is the overhanging sheet swaying in the wind – fifth drama – in “La danza” (The dance), short yet intense film which accompanies Duran’s work Arianna and Aracne: a premonition? The little girl who dances, the primitive gesture almost propitiatory. The enchantment of childhood and the disillusion of growing up; chaos and order. A poignant film in which Arianna’s thread has curdled in a scar that wounds the little girl’s expectations.
Yet Duran does not acknowledge the final pessimism of Saramago.
She offers her point of view to the anesthetizing of emotions and of reactivity, a course which is homage to the strength of sufferance and to the courage of living. So that the (collective) memory and the (personal) recollection should be nourishment for the present and everyone’s future.
This is Barbara’s gift: she gives us an emotional landscape, feelings as monads and clefts, or open and scented spaces, colours, sounds, an instrument to uproot our memories, which slowly rise to where resistance can be felt and the sound of distances crossed, in personal “respites of the heart” and of the mind. It is what happens watching the film “Don’t leave me”: a long journey through the complexities of life which leads to the serenity of separation, to the awareness and the acceptance; in the artist’s own words: “which allows struggle, integrity, ethics and compassion”.
Not by chance the landing place, a non-place, should be a multitude of souls, of lights, of sounds and of… memories, a path in fact she shows us herself as an itinerary of salvation.
And all this with the technical knowledge of who handles the camera as if it were a brush, being able to give back to the observer the sense of discovery of a canvas in progression.
Anna Gioioso
Amber swept away
by rivers of lava
the seed is born
in the obscure womb
and the Valkyrie
intones her song.
The hand glows
slender and branded
giving to the present
the ample gift
of a solemn embrace
overwhelming
and bitter so often.
Turgid and tenuous
the shadow wanders
and flows
in amorous dances
eternally restless
blurring time,
reborn exiled body
light and vain.
From the earth
the clear darkness,
from the grain
the heavy growing
arduous and filled
with hope. A gift
being without deferring
fate and voluptuous sigh.
Delicate zephyr
melts springs away.
You have gathered
spheres and brightened
souls absorbed
in their secrets.
You are the tower
facing mine
between the two
we build a wake
diaphanous and
everlasting,
a bridge of pearls
that fade at sunset.
You are
the gleam of dawn.
Patrizia de Rachewiltz
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