Bambee

ecoteca/schede/barbara/english.html

Contemporary Art Exhibition
by
Barbara Agreste


Exhibition curated by Luigi Pagliarini
Critical text by Valentina Bernabei
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Critical text "16 mm" (Barbara Agreste)
Fresh painting diluted in film. It is an unreal space that in which Barbara Agreste's eyes wander, painted with intense colours that change form green to bleu. A space crossed over with long steps and with a glance to 16 mm, which induces the viewer to a prolonged observation of the screen.
In this video work two phases, two different ways of operating coexist: the artist cares for technique and language only after defining the hortus conclusus to represent.
At first her physical relation to the canvas, and then the floating one with the video camera, that lets the artist free to research the image, in tune with an approach dear to the ècole du regard established in France at the beginning of the '70, which placed an internal and spontaneous vision before any other structured logic of expression, and before any narrative modality made of tested or predefined schemes.
“Here and there a more uniform surface, only veiled by a thin fluid blanket, allows an instance of running, but then between two rocky walls, I meet a passage in which I risk at every step to lose my balance.” (Alain Robbe-Grillet).
The potential of the technique is here surpassed, and the purpose of bringing value to the nature of the surface, the colours, and the gesture is stepped over: the line hasn't got anymore any value in itself, but it acquires one with the new medium, thanks to the contamination between images and other image as it is peculiar to the contemporary visual arts.
Thus, a flow of “imaginary” without a form or any rational contour is represented, faithful only to the mood of the material: the language comes out of itself, moves away from a private and subjective dimension, and across a juxtaposition of styles and levels it pushes itself towards an easiness of expression consecrated by video as the supreme communicating medium.

Valentina Bernabei


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.