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.
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.
Babel Tower Story
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The Tower of Babel
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Barbel Tower Story
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The Tower of Babel is an interesting subject from my point of view. It was reported in the Bible (Genesis 11:1-9), and it tells the story of humans that once upon a time all spoke the same language on earth. As people migrated from the east, they settled in a land called Shinar which in the Bible appears eight times and it refers to Babylonia, a territory encompassing both the city of Baylon (Babel) and the southern city Erech. Babylonia used to be a great and powerful empire.
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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Dolls
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I love dolls.
If I could I would buy an entire collection of them: dolls of all kinds.
It was very interesting to discover that there are so many dolls out there in the market, just by searching on the internet I found entire forums on dolls, not Barbies, but many versions of the most refined, strange, and unusual dolls for collection.
Three years ago I bought a doll from Korea, a beautiful piece of art, and with it I made a lot of digital and oil paintings. I am still doing it, my research with the doll seems to have no end, I have infinite questions for the doll, therefore I keep photographing it.
Sublime dolls and deceit
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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.
Ghost
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oil on canvas
80 x 60 cm
2012
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Ghost
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Earth
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oil on canvas
90 x 84 cm
2011
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Earth
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This painting is about the earth. It is so because the earth is the place that welcomes all of us when we are unable to stand, or walk. When we have a problem with our balance, the earth is there to protect us, and will guide us through the recovery of our right senses, and of our conscious life.
When I made this painting I was excited about the outcome of the doll’s body, it was an incredible discovery that I could render the lights, and shadows of the feet, legs and trunk so well, so naturally, with no need to make things perfect, and with just a few brush strokes, things would come out so plausible. I decided then to make the face, and it hasn’t turned out to be so convincing.
But I did not want to change it, because I thought perfection in this case was not needed: we have the face of a puppet, and the atmosphere of this painting is uncanny, wants to be sinister. Therefore why to make the doll’s face more human?
The message is one of “transformation of pain”, “transfiguration”, so even if the nose wouldn’t return a mathematical perfection in its lightings, I left the features distorted intentionally, so the sensation that some sort of unstable dream is going on stays with the viewer.
I wanted to create the flashback of a dream: the picture is like a film frame that would pass, like a lightning strike, trough the length of the film, a sudden opening of light into the unconscious mind of the viewer/author/protagonist.
This earth painting is one of a series of paintings that represent the concept of ground as an important resource of reconstitution. It is the ever resting place for the body: in my imaging a ground not very detailed, rather blank and anonymous, but yet still very present and important for understanding the transitional state of the Nigredo.
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Earth
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Black Bough Doll
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oil on canvas
77 x 51 cm
2011
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Black Bough Doll
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