Curated by Anna Isopo, with a critical text by Lorenzo Canova.
19-31 October 2024
Opening Saturday 19th October 2024 17:30
Arte Borgo Gallery – Borgo Vittorio 25 – Roma
Metamorphosys of Light and Darkness
Lorenzo Canova
Towards the Border:
A vision immersed in the alchemical transit from darkness to light, the search for a splendour that shines in the folds of darkness, a journey of sublimation from matter to spirit obtained through the ancient tools of painting: In her most recent cycle, Barbara Duran brought a long process of technical and conceptual rarefaction to completion. A journey that takes form through a new synthesis of her style and compositional ethos. To better understand the works exhibited here, it is important to look back to certain phases that have preceded them and that were exhibited in Duran’s retrospective White in the Ex-Cartiera Latina in Rome in 2021.
The first piece of evidence is the progressive disappearance of the human figure that, for example, was central in the vast installation Icone Mondo #1-#90 (2016-2021), whereinwhich appeared citations to great past masters such as, amongst others, Rembrandt, Masaccio, Antonello da Messina or Piero della Francesca; or in some paintings from 2016 where we find an intense dialogue with Artemisia Gentileschi, Goya or Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Already in these paintings, however, we find the beginnings of a new journey, in which the constructive schemas and the cromatic displays progressively lose much of their material presence, reaching instead a dimension of spiritual lightness, towards a new understanding and a different internal steadfastness, held up by a necessary transformation of the brushwork, which nonetheless maintains the rigour of its secret coherence.
This development is especially evident in the other installation: Servae. Icone Liquide of 2018, where the iconic presence of the female figures was at the same time evanescent and looming, translucid and substantial, in a union of opposites that seemed to prelude the almost hermetic mechanisms of the most recent works, with their marriage of day and night, celebrated in a true ‘ars magna’ of light and shadow.
The next step was then the dialogue with landscape and nature of the years between 2018 and 2020, in paintings and cycles like Opera Prima, Appearance, Dream or Instant Light, where the structure of the pictorial architecture lost embodiment to move towards a meditation focused on the vibrations of increasingly rarified colour, in a sort of living and pulsing mist in which appeared the shapes of the sun, of strange lands, of a symbolic Venice, of countries which Duran has travelled like an explorer of the soul, in order to almost surpass the border of visibility and touch the unsayable limit of the invisible, of which we can almost smell the scent in her most recent work.
Thus we find paintings from 2020 like Blue #1, Blue #2, Blue Wave, Dawn Sky or Yellow Light, which, together with the Water Flowers of 2018 and the Water Colors of 2019 and other similar works, could be considered a prelude to the most recent paintings, in their going toward an anti-iconic dimension which preserves the memories of blooms and horizons, the secret core of spaces that open like doors to an internal perception, in the surpassing of a border of the gaze that reaches completion through the secret harmonies of a renewed eye.
The mutations of the Golden Rule:
The cycle of paintings collected in this exhibit thus represents a final (but not definitive) product of the previous journey, a landing which does not forget what came before it, but presents itself in the changing of its essence and form.
For these works Duran has chosen a wide set of inspirations, starting from the idea of reciprocity in the Cunfucian Golden Rule which led her to work in an even more intense way on the idea of metamorphosis, developed with a painting that, in a circular and uninterrupted way, transforms into the eternal archetypical return that goes from obscurity to clarity, from darkness to splendour.
These paintings place themselves on the side of abstraction, but the brushwork does not lose the force of language, in a secret dialogue where Eraclitus seems to meet Confucius and where the brush immerses itself in the stream of poetic speech, in a paradoxical meeting where the spoken and the seen embrace in a mysterious fusion.
The brushwork holds the results of this process with energy, joy and rigour, in a progression where the brush abandons the tactile substance of chromatic matter and choses a path of lightness and brilliance, of shimmering insouciant pigments, of variations on metals, gold in its declinations and the signs of a hint of silver.
The verses of Shakespeare and Paul Celan, of Ai Quing, Leonard Cohen and Paolo Conte are brushed by Duran’s hand and re-composed in symbolic waves of a great sea of being and the white lakes of silence, while the poppies lead us from sleep and oblivion onto a new blossoming of colour abandoned on the canvas.
Duran thus takes on this trip in which gray elevates itself with mutable and precious brilliance, of signs that lead us to unknown thresholds that pulse in the mist like an ever postponed arrival. The artist guides us in the inexhaustible tension of a journey where good and evil are reflected and embrace each other in the revolutions of an arcane and necessary union, where one symultaneously is and is not, where beginnings meet endings and renovate each other in the circularity of an alternate timeline that explores the enigmas of the deep and the origin.
In the fog of this dark cloak we thus find the glory of sudden and striking illuminations where blues and reds distill the nectar of heavenly flowers and scents that lead to islands faraway in time and memory, rediscovered in the revelation of new routes, hidden in the constant metamorphoses in which the painting and its author annihilate each other and are born again in the constant renewal of painting and its deepest essence.