Barbara d'Antuono

The black eyes Barbara d'Antuono Contemporary textile art Haiti bees poetry

2024

Penelope or Parque of modern times, Barbara d’Antuono sews by hand like others recite mantras and decides nothing in advance. She lets images arise without any particular coherence with each other, but to which she gives substance in a kind of urgency, in the form of a strip not drawn but sewn. The exhibition, like the eponymous book, covers seven years of this assiduous and patient work through nearly 30 textile works, real freeze frames made of the emotions and memories of the artist, like so many portraits of humanity. . Her meeting in Haiti with Baron Samedi and the mythology linked to voodoo, as well as the traumatic splashes of the 1986 coup d’etat and the abuses she witnessed, precipitated her into this need to say the unspeakable. Globe-trotter, she nourishes her work with her travels, particularly in Africa where she finds voodoo, and on the slopes of all the volcanoes of the world. Creator of the imagination, she thus gives birth under her fingers to a jubilant, dreamlike, ironic, carnivalesque and sometimes naive world. Impregnated with this tasty mixture, all his work condenses in a flamboyant baroque syncretism, where humor is never far away and Haiti always present. Barbara d’Antuono, a Corsican of Italian origin born in 1961, left France in the 1980s for the West Indies and Jamaica. It was in the artistic abundance of Haiti, where she remained for 5 years, that she was introduced to painting and sculpture, notably in the studio of the Haitian painter Ronald Mevs. The magic, her inner demons and the aesthetics of her work as a visual artist are revealed to her. She began her artistic journey with assemblages of wood and bone, collages, totems, fetishes… Babette El Saieh, daughter of the great collector Issa El Saieh, gave her her first chance to exhibit at the Olofson Hotel in Port au Prince. After several exhibitions in Haiti, she left the island following the 1986 coup. Back in France, she developed her own technique combining sculpture, painting, graphics, sewing, poetry and music. From 1995, she exhibited regularly in Paris, Germany… She participated in several group exhibitions, including one in tribute to Wilfredo Lam at Unesco. Recognized by the Art Factory and Art de Rien galleries, she has exhibited several times at the Lavoir Moderne Parisien as well as at the Chapel of the College of Carpentras. In 2014, she presented a few magnetic paintings, textile paintings and fetish dolls in the collective exhibition ‘Follow my gaze’, which marked the birth certificate of L’oeil de la femme à barbe.