Sara Barbin
S.Lunatic – la Vista dalla stanza di Penelope, acrylic on canvas, 40x50cm, August 25.
La Riunione delle Ancelle, acrylic on canvas, 80x60, July 25.
STATEMENT
La Riunione delle Ancelle and S.Lunatic – la vista dalla stanza di Penelope, form a diptych of memory and myth, fragments refracted through colour. Both works draw loosely from the ancient Greek Odyssey and Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad, where the silent voices of Penelope and Penelope’s maids rise alongside the epic’s familiar heroics.
In La Riunione delle Ancelle (the Maids’ meeting) we stand in the breath before rupture—the moment before the maids’ execution. Vast flowers swirl like vortexes, their petals twisting into spirals that draw the eye inward. They are both beautiful and terrifying, embodying the pull toward an inescapable fate, a slow descent into a world of death.
S.Lunatic – la vista dalla stanza di Penelope (the view from Penelope’s room) carries that tension into a wider, more distant view: the hybrid moon–sun poised at the threshold of day, suspended over a tumultuous sea. Beneath the rolling water lies an undercurrent of angst, yet above it, the calm of the sunset moment spreads like a veil. This quiet–restless dichotomy mirrors Penelope’s own solitude—outwardly still, inwardly teeming with thought, memory, and desire held in a fragile balance between endurance and longing.
Both paintings inhabit the space between myth and witness. Through abstraction, they open a field where colour becomes testimony, and where the unseen parts of the story find a place to stay.
La Riunione delle Ancelle
A breath before the end: vast flowers spiral into vortexes, beautiful and cruel, pulling all toward an inescapable fate.
S.Lunatic, la vista dalla stanza di Penelope
The hybrid moon–sun hovers over a restless sea, calm light spread like a veil above hidden turmoil. Penelope watches—still on the surface, overflowing within.
Sara Barbin @empress_drawings