Puzzle art: Walking on tiles

Recognizing a puzzle.

Mosaics like a puzzle are there because someone needed to reconstruct a complete visible picture with tiny fragments of color found in the soil coming form an ancient world.
Chessboards are like mosaics in Barbara Agreste‘s work: walking into the right tile bends the space of a dream to a safe exit, and stepping into the wrong spot opens the door to a repellent trip, a place infested with insects and worms.

There’s nothing intact in Barbara Agreste’s world: every element in the scene has the potential to detach itself very fast from where it dwells, great rocks may swing and hit the viewer, or change shape suddenly, and block the way. Everything in this landscape is about to scatter away crumbling apart at every glance as the visitor passes through its immense paradoxical mixture of distorted shapes.
Barbara Agreste’s fantastic world is constructed with many elements taken from nature, and she is interested in transforming the smallest details of the world of reality to which we are accustomed to. The tiny leaves, the petals, or the wings of an insect in her tale are not so obvious or insignificant: they are presented as misshapen huge obstacles, and they start to grow enormous along the way threatening to engulf the visitor. Massive seeds, twigs and bones are stuck to the ground, massive leaves soaked with blood move slightly in a not very defined direction, and the look of them instils a sense of dizziness: it is as if you won’t be so sure any more of  the gravity beneath your feet. Everything is doomed to fall apart at every instant. The guest is taken by the artist into a path so narrow and so asphyxiating that it is sensed as an hungry throat ready to swallow anybody who dares not fearing it. Be careful when you enter this misleading site, it may be a place built as a trap by hidden entities that lie all the time. The artist wants to portray a postmodern physical architecture that it is completely man made perhaps, even if all you see is gigantic elements of nature.

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