Dark Pop Surrealism

The Tower Trilogy


The Tower Trilogy

 The Tower Trilogy has three titles that originated in Italian: “La Torre, Le Formiche, Lo Specchio” and they translate this way in english : “The Tower, The Insects, The Mirror”. This animation is made with 16 mm film, and DV video, and it is very abstract although some figures appear on the screen at some points.

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Ruby Red Hair

Ruby Red Hair Tao and Playing Cards - Pop Surrealism Series Drawing of a woman with Red Hair, printed on her dress are the images of playing cards, a heart, the Tao Symbol, and Snakes.

Ruby Red Hair, Tao,
and Playing Cards.

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,

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Blue Mermaid

Blue Mermaid Drawing, pastels on acid free paper by Barbara Agreste.

Pastels on
acid free paper

24 x 35 cm

Blue Mermaid

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.

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Dark Pop Surrealism

 

Dark Pop Surrealism

 

Dark Pop Surrealism Blood

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?

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Nigredo Blackness

Nigredo Blackness is a digital painting conveying the alchemical stage of blackness and putrefaction...

 

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.

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Poisoned Ivy

About Barbara Agreste

Poisoned ivy - About Barbara Agreste - Ophelia Blood Lake - A painting from "The Catharsis of Ophelia" series.

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.

poisoned-ivy

Poisoned Ivy

About Barbara Agreste

Fairy Doll


Oil painting of a doll as Fairy, from the Ophelia series by Barbara Agreste.

Fairy Doll (Ophelia Series)
90 x90 cm
Oil on canvas

Fairy Doll

Sublime dolls and deceit

Sublime Dolls is a review about Barbara Agreste: her video art shows restless figures and the anxiety of...

Sublime Dolls

Barbara Agreste, post-surrealist artist, much appreciated abroad for her VideoArt, is presenting for the exhibition “The sharing of difference” four paintings that dwell on the subtle dreamy line that separates life and death.

Her figures have no peace, and are representative of the uncertainty and anxiety of the contemporary human soul.

 

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Alice’s Inverted Reality

Alice - a trip into a mad inverted reality of mirrors and check points...

Alice’ inverted reality

Barbara Agreste‘s art can be defined as a multifaceted philosopher stone. Her creations are an intense and almost infinite work of layering thin petals and other transparent material one on top of the other, closely looking into reconstructing lost patterns, and existing forms with new colors, as if behind every object an unidentifiable amount blood is about to flow.

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In Reptilica Barbara Agreste’s Symbols

Barbara Agreste's symbols. The doll is also sadly a symbol for a perfect lifeless beauty...

“In Reptilica i simboli
di Barbara Agreste”

Video of the week:
“In Reptilica Barbara Agreste’s symbols”

Review by Claudia Quintieri | 18 June 2012

Barbara Agreste loved art ever since. Her formal training begun at the art College of her town, and after that she lived in Milan for some time attending a Set Design course in Brera Academy.

Video Art, Short Film by Barbara Agreste. Image with a doll on a checkered blue floor watching worms pass by.

(The image above refers to the short animated filmReptilica)

In 1993 she moved to the UK where at first she took contemporary dance classes, and performed in dance companies; but after two years she returned to the visual arts enrolling at the University of Kent.

 

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Ghost

Ghost, Painting of a Doll from the Ophelia Pop surrealism series by Barbara Agreste

oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm
2012

Ghost

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Video Art Reptilica animation