Traces

A summer to keep me company in the flow of a pungent and sweet pain.
Me listening to myself. Time to calm down, reality to balance, resize ghosts,
the dream to bring out the soul. Fears, spells and the nature of things.

An important and full summer.

The bike rides on the edge of the Canal du Midi, the unexpected coincidences, the presence in another form of those who generated me and I know, love me and protect me. The deep sea and the full moon, the breath of a butterfly to calm the tears and loneliness.

A summer, a crossroads.

The fullness of maturity to hold my hand, in its diaphanous and cold beauty, to hide the passion. The memory of a tender and complete childhood dances in memory and holds the ranks of a life that desires coherence and dignity. Thought, in the consciousness of the passage, imagines one’s face and body tired and wrinkled waiting patiently for a time that will come inexorably.

Barbara Duran (Toulouse 2013)

Three female figures to protect and remember all this. To accompany the steps.
Guardians of an intimate and infinite universe, which belongs to Nature, in its unavoidable phases.

In fullness, in sweetness, in difficulty, to give strength and patience, as mothers / daughters / sisters of every soul, restless and serene.

A summer of lights and shadows.
Light like air, heavy like metal, liquid like water and pungent like fire,

the water washed the walls and cleared away the useless frills.

The interior architectures have made room for colors and fluid and rarefied passages: inappariscent.

Colors no longer feelings, but breaths.

The forms osmosis with the universe: the wind. The earth, the sand, the light and the stone.

Now, without ego I am through. My companions are humble, sincere and delicate.

Detachment still far away, life in hand.

Barbara Duran (summer 2013)

For Barbara

I have known Barbara for a long time. I know his passion for painting, for teaching, for sharing “knowledge”, even in ancient times when he was looking for his way. I know his early works. I know his determination to achieve the result he had set for himself.

I know his stubbornness, silent will to capture “memories” that he wants to bring to light.

I knew, and I say this with great nostalgia, his mother to whom this exhibition is partly dedicated.

The characteristic of Barbara Duran is her absolute certainty of wanting to understand her “state of mind” in a single gesture. In a sense, to understand and force reality if necessary.

Contemporary art no longer invites us to the aesthetic dimension of the gaze, but to the vertigo of the ever-changing image.

And this which can appear only theory, in Barbara’s production is one of the peculiarities with a new opening to new formulas, as well as with a more current reading of aesthetic canons by exploiting an unprecedented liberation of shapes, colors, aesthetic concepts, through the loss of innocence but here it becomes a stage of the mind, of the imagination, of the whole creative process.

For Barbara Duran, this old-time artist, who shuns the clamor of criticism as a life practice, the sheet of paper as the canvas, the video, the mixing between photos and painting are intended as an “atmospheric space” to be animated, to be made to live and vibrate with forms entrusted to the values of the line, the sign and the rhythms.

The alleged “innocent eye” of the user is the tool the artist uses to justify

The analytical nature of the descriptions and the many mythological explanations:

personal mythology, historical mythology, ancestral mythology. Everything is part of the game and the figuration.

His attention to forms, dissolved, articulated or composed in a single panel made up of several paintings, has certainly become one of his productive compositional constant.

The perspective always becomes a “seeing through”, and we believe we are looking through a continuous landscape scenography, the space represented becomes a space of aggregates.

His accent on the detail that becomes mosaic, in the large figure, makes us understand how recently he has been studying and deepening the discourse on the Myth in its various declinations and exceptions. Myth also declined as a personal mythical past that she tries undaunted to bring to light contrary to our current attitude which is to bury it.

We are thus faced with past, present and future merged in a single embrace, in a multimedia composition, which only a repeated and in-depth vision can communicate to us all the maieutic work that lies behind it.

Renato Miracco
Art Curator and Director of the Italian Cultural Institute, New York

I met Barbara Duran before her works, and I met her bursting and restless vitality mixed with subdued painful pauses, vigorous fury, and moments of pure joy or pungent pain: like from a trunk, always in tow, carrying the variegated arsenal of existence, its motions of soul and body come out to stage, from time to time, absolute shreds.

But to the Absolute, Barbara Duran does not allow to occupy the scene entirely and definitively, undermined by the ironic gap that demands suspension and alternation of gaze, always lucid, but oblique and disenchanted.

All his work – and Passages with particular effectiveness – testifies to the creative outcome of the transposition-transfiguration of the process of Memory, never petrified in the fixity of a memory, never identical to itself, because it is constantly renewed by unexpected apparitions, alternations and forgetfulness.

The result is a pictorial construction of which the fleeting and fleeting outlines of the figures (as in the three female images), and the swirling or resting of the color, tell of how the subsided and the resurfacing become confused and chase each other, without ever allowing any detail of becoming obsession.

And the “… life that desires coherence and dignity”, as Barbara Duran claims, is precisely that which does not allow itself to be subjected to the compulsive and paralyzing demand of memory, encysted in immutable pain. But indulging in the suffering that undertakes to unravel the threads of pain and opening dams to the confluence of past and future, life announces, welcomes and celebrates its inevitable passages. In turmoil and quiet.

Anna Pintus

Passages

In her autobiographical exhibition, Barbara DURAN, an artist and painter of Italian origin, makes us relive the three months following the loss of her mother through fifteen large-format paintings. disappearance. And together with her we are struck in the heart, in the most painful path there is: that of mourning for a loved one. But Passages is not a sad exhibition, on the contrary it is a real story in images, full of joy, of shared pleasures, of moments of happy intimacy. Where we discover how the death of the mother gradually becomes a fixed point and sign in the unfolding of life, a stage inscribed in the process of renunciation, of taking and leaving, of acceptance: an initiatory journey in which the artist believed to accompany her mother, but where, in reality, she was instead led by her mother. Barbara DURAN participates in the school of death. She leafs through the pages of a notebook that her mother offers her, to teach her to accept, as she once taught her to hold a spoon, or to take the first steps. Day after day, her mother teaches her to play down this final moment and to consider her disappearance as natural as a birth: a transition. Because this death, however violent it may be, is a gift, a gift that he wants to share and transmit with this exhibition. The extraordinary tale of a story between a mother and a daughter, and which possesses a universal light. We are all sons and daughters that we will lose we have lost father or mother. I wish this project could open a new look on the death of those we love most.

Marc Higonnet