Luogo Segreto new pictorial cycle (works 2011-12) by Barbara Duran, composed of oil paintings on wood of small, medium and large size, flanked by sequences of works on mixed media paper, was born and developed in the intimate and spiritual relationship of the artist with nature and the phenomena that derive from it, of epiphanies and disappearances, resolved as “diamond images”, in whose facets it is possible to find between the past and the future, the memory of painting, a reflection of existence.

I saw for the first time a painting by Barbara Duran in a gallery in via Margutta in Rome at the collective exhibition curated by Michele Von Buren.
I had been attracted to an oversized little girl figure, a little girl who ran. The painting immediately took me back to Buenos Aires, where a dear friend of mine Diana Aisemberg has also been painting little girls for years. And I later learned that Barbara Duran lived and worked once in Buenos Aires, all those little girls represent feel, in my memory, my childhood, my childhood in Argentina. Today I saw other works by Barbara in Rome, images in speed, as if they were seen from a moving train, blurry horizontal lines and a few stubborn vertical lines, as if they resisted speed; trees perhaps, rooted to the ground but flexible.

A rigid reed breaks, a flexible reed bends in the wind and then comes back to its feet.
Here is the secret.

Marco Bechis

SECRET PLACE
Works 2011-12

It is always like a slow settling down when a work takes shape.
This recent cycle has taken its aspect as if the lightness it encompasses
the signs, spaces and colors so linked to the natural state of the elements of which it is composed
I am and that it wants to relive there, two-dimensional and blocked as in perpetual motion. It becomes
look, glare, sequence: a point of view, a monad.
It is the vital moment that encompasses the set of infinite moments that animate life itself.

It is easier to leave your hair to the wind, to leave your thoughts behind. Don’t give up. But the change lies in the detachment.

So every blade of grass, every path, every bud are microcosms, as immense as
open landscapes or skies, places of memory marked by time. Mental places e
metaphysical, like our souls, our bodies, our signs.
Colors like thoughts, long paths that bind and define boundaries.
Thick matter as a painful distance, which vanishes into indefinite, supple and
fleeting colors, long beaches, wide fields, infinite skies or thin backgrounds for
close the space, so the thought, and let everything be, let everything go by itself, in
natural circuits. Prudent trees and faithful guardians to mark time and space,
also of the composition.
Everything happened in unexpected but desired sequences, in slow times but also
short, now I know that everything is there, a cycle has ended and asks for its pause and its breath.

Barbara Duran, Bagnoregio, March 2012.

What is the sound of water

or a tree falling into space
when there is no one ad
listen to him?
What is the dream of stones?
and the feeling of the earth

in the tracks of our shoes?
Thus the painting of Barbara Duran,

it dialogues with nature and at the same
time invents it.

He shows us
secrets that
no one can look,
because they belong to others
worlds …
His colors are the palette that
moves a sun in a space
unique,
multiform, infinite;
waiting..

Gaston Troiano

The flow of water like the flow of life.
The succession of days, seasons, colors and places. Like the succession
of the wave that tirelessly repeats itself, each time with new material, liquid and transparent.
Frames / monads of a universe, microcosms of macrocosms.
Life is a prism … with many faces, with countless colors and scents: from
the brackish one of the sea and oceans to the turgid one of the earth, from the acrid one
of blood and death to the silent and muffled one of snow, from the fragrant one
from flowers to the intense one of animals … we tread the same countless streets
and we look at infinite shades of the sky and clouds, of the water we are made of.
We are all of this.

Barbara Duran