Description
Imagined Lands is a pictorial atlas that traces the blurred boundary between the real and the imaginary. Like Ulysses on his adventurous journey back to Ithaca, Barbara Pastorino guides us through lands that exist and lands we experience only in fantasy: Troy and Sicily merge with Ogygia and the desolate lands of the Cyclopes, creating an emotional geography where every color is a destination, every layer a story.
The surface of the work resembles a landscape seen from above, a nautical chart erased by time and rewritten by memory. Deep blues evoke the seas sailed by the Homeric hero, while violets and magentas transport us to the dreamlike dimensions of enchanted islands. Golden sands and umbers anchor the composition to the concreteness of real geography, but it is precisely in their fusion with celestial blues and misty grays that the magic happens: the boundary between what was and what could have been dissolves.
The material textures reflect the stratification of Homer’s narrative: each brushstroke is an adventure, each pigment an encounter, each chromatic layering a memory that overlaps another. Terre Immaginate is a work that speaks of travel as an existential metaphor.
