The die is cast
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The die is cast is a new series of paintings by Barbara Agreste.
This time I was able to do what really was in my mind, having discovered technically how to make sure that my oil pastels would imprint themselves into the canvas (smaller size watercolor paper) in a way in which they could dry, and be secured beneath a shiny layer of transparent acrylic medium. Basically plasticized and packaged. No more insecure smudgy surfaces.
I said to myself: “I want to be free with my subjects, and represent through them, and through these images my real self”. It has been injected into these figures, as they tend to be contemplating a game of dice (or chess as a returning theme in my artwork), and cards, the impression that they seem to be wanting to hold or catch the time it takes for the thrown dice to reach the end of its journey. They stand still, waiting for the end of the gamble. It’s the state of uncertainty that I have come to immortalise in these images: they’re completely out of time, the space is expanded, and they live an eternal awakening, stepping into the spotlight.
“Will I make it through the evening?”; “Will I make it to the next day?”: these are the questions that these characters are asking themselves, while the moon light, or a strangely orange sun, unveil their fear, which becomes a form of a courage when overtly confronted.
It’s a photograph of the very moment when someone realizes that there is nothing to fear at all, maybe that state of tension is itself a trap, it is that fraction of a second in which from being attached to that kind of subtle pain they take the step forward towards wanting to really see if it’s true that the future is so gloomy, so adverse. In that very moment we take that future in our hands, we step into a place of slow observation. Having come close to the mirror of fate, we really see its nature: however the events will unfold, the end of the journey of the dice is not so important after all as it gives us just two possibilities, and we’re waiting without distinction for one or the other.
Leftovers, Ropes.
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Leftovers, Ropes.
One minute trailer.
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This is the last video I made, after this I have been unable to produce more videos and films, for a long time. This film is about a red sea, the water in this film is of a deep intense red, and it represents a great catastrophe which has taken place, and is still taking place at sea, in the Mediterranean. When I shot this film, I wasn’t aware of what was about to happen in the future: but as usual, Continue reading
Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf
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Virginia Woolf
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Drawing Series, Woman’s face 3,
pastels and acrylics on acid-free paper
by Barbara Agreste.
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Virginia Woolf and her story.
I will never understand Virginia Woolf‘s story, I mean the way it ended. As with Ophelia, the fictional character from Shakespeare, I will analyse Virginia Woolf’s suicide this time. Why am I interested in it? Because it is something I fail to understand completely, and surely to imagine how such an act of removing oneself’s life is possible, I would have to dig deeply into the reasons beyond it.
Reptilica
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Reptilica
Reptilica is partly animation and partly a film where real people perform. It Starts with a doll which is animated with the stop motion technique, she is searching through the many dry leaves that rest on the floor, something she has seen or felt passing by, but she can’t seem to find it.
Other scenes in the movie introduce small pink worms falling on a group of ivy leaves, these are the disturbing presence that bother the doll as they sneak under the leaves, never letting themselves to be seen.
The Checkered Tunnel
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The Checkered Tunnel
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The Checkered Tunnel is a animation made entirely with 3D software. This short movie represents a fragmented space made of a checkered tunnel where the squares that fill its walls, floor, and ceiling alternate from red to white (the colour red is a metaphor for trauma).
At the opening of the piece the point of view of the spectator (the camera) is turning on itself in a chequered room with a missing wall leading to a black void.
Ruby Red Hair
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Ruby Red Hair, Tao,
and Playing Cards.
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Ruby Red Hair: Drawing Series – pastels on acid free paper.
This is a drawing of a woman with Ruby Red Hair, or vivid dark red hair: she is the icon of wild nature when the human meets with the darkest and most enigmatic side of the earth. The carmine, vivid crimson colour of her hair represents a particular moment in time when her menstrual cycle is in the bleeding phase. This phase is very strange: the hair of the woman hasn’t always been red, but when the bleeding time comes, her hair turns suddenly carmine,
Blue Mermaid
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Pastels on
acid free paper
24 x 35 cm
Blue Mermaid
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A mermaid (Blue Mermaid) is a legendary aquatic creature with the upper body of a female human and the tail of a fish. Mermaids appear in the folklore of many cultures worldwide.
Dark Pop Surrealism
Dark Pop Surrealism
Dark Pop Surrealism
Dolls are surreal, dark and today they have come to represent perfect, endless, but also lifeless beauty. I must also add “voiceless beauty” too, since a doll doesn’t speak. I have used dolls several times in my images in the attempt to emphasize the fact that a woman in many situations is seen and treated as a doll. But, if a doll is voiceless, would images of dolls speak any sort of truth about them?
Nigredo Blackness
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Nigredo Blackness
The Catharsis of Ophelia
Nigredo Blackness. Today I looked at some of my digital paintings from the Nigredo series, and I found out that many of them were left unfinished. I was especially interested in one of those images, the one that best represents the Nigredo phase, one that has actually a lot of black matter in it, an almost entirely black and white piece.
Poisoned Ivy
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About Barbara Agreste
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Poisoned Ivy
Barbara Agreste, post surrealist artist, her artwork takes the viewer into a dreamy world full of tricky tiles, falling flowers, and sharp shards.
She blends poisoned ivy to the image of Ophelia, showcasing a doll as the best example of her strange way of conceiving beauty: never flaunting, discreet and androgynous, part of a concealed world immersed in thriving nature and cold swamps, a fragile universe of subtle ethereal pain and melancholic moods.
Barbara Agreste disseminates fallen petals, disconnected shiny leaves, and fragments of mirror along impervious paths, leading the viewer of her video art, and short films to a journey characterized by the instability of walls and floors, and by the dazing alternating colours of unsteady tiles. There is always danger in these adventures, uncanny places of hidden eyes, or architectures built with the special purpose of causing accidents to the passengers. It is nature the tricky environment, full of leaves and blood, but this natural lanscape is also magnified and remoulded: it is not a totally true vegetation that we see, but rather a genetiacally modified one, a distorted natural proliferation, reminiscent of the cinematic settings, assembled like a labirinth hiding too many things, leading to a previously arranged scene.
Never trust your eyes.
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Poisoned Ivy
About Barbara Agreste
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Fairy Doll
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Fairy Doll (Ophelia Series)
90 x90 cm
Oil on canvas
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Fairy Doll
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