"I don't believe there's a precise moment when a human being "becomes an artist"; perhaps one is born as such and awaits the right moment to translate their thoughts into an expressive form. At least, that's what happened to me.

I trained to become a designer and have been working for several years in fashion, interior design, and luxury sector communication, a context characterized by beauty and creativity whose "pop-glossy" visual imagery has strongly influenced my aesthetics.

In particular, fashion represents an idealized world, the "grand dream" to which our society identifies, a place halfway between reality and imagination that often conceals emptiness behind it.

But what is emptiness? Why does it make us uncomfortable? We, in the Western world, give a negative connotation to this idea, while for Eastern cultures, emptiness is an "infinite potential." Can emptiness be the source of everything, the font of creation? Can we conceive the universe as a generative void? Is it possible to comprehend emptiness with our minds? Is it nothing, or is it an essence: a form, a sign, a color, a perception...

After a long period of reflection, I tried to look beyond what was visible to the naked eye, finding my conception of emptiness that synthesizes a "presence" in "non-presence."

 

The choice to paint my subjects with a larger eye stems from my personal experience: the eye, according to numerous cultures, represents the awakening of our deepest and spiritual self (often used as a symbol of God); it is a symbol of intuition and exploration, and in indian tradition, the eye is wisdom and omniscience capable of seeing beyond mere manifestation; it is the destruction of evil due to ignorance to achieve awareness, the collapse of the metaphysical illusion that keeps the individual separate from the universal.

 

My characters are all of us but enlightened: they look beyond, breaking what is seemingly visible. In their quest for understanding, they break apart, dematerialize, to see what lies beyond their ego, beyond physical reality, thoughts, emotions, in the pursuit of the truth about the cosmos that we may not know but is worth continuing to seek..."

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(by B.Polvora)

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"Barbara Polvora's art is a journey into the dream realm, into unexplored places of being, from which testimonies emerge in the form of iconic paintings, the result of her current research and understanding. She is an artist who fights and triumphs, capturing the essence of things and the meaning of life with her large eye, as if it were a photographic lens. Her inspiration, recounting fragmented faces and identities, can be traced back to Biographical Surrealism: a transversal territory between the visible and the invisible, where the artist operates by removing from the flattened visions of existence the essences that have survived the ailing world of today, preserving only the real values."

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(Critical text by Mauririzio Quartieri, written for the solo exhibition "Occhio Nudo." Forum Artis Museum, Rocca Montecuccoli, Montese (Mo),

August 2020.)

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