Description
Calypso’s Island is a visual journey into the sea, where time stands still and reality dissolves between layers of turquoise, emerald green, and gold. Like the island of Ogygia described in the Odyssey—remote, mythical, timeless—this work transports us to a space suspended between memory and desire.
The pictorial surface is constructed through material layers of acrylic and pigments that evoke the island’s lush nature: the sacred groves reflected in the springs, Calypso’s mysterious cave, the sea that hides and reveals. The nymph’s very name, from the Greek kalýpto (καλύπτω, “to hide”), finds its translation in this composition where forms emerge and are concealed, where color covers and reveals, where each layer conceals another world beneath.
The dominant shades of turquoise and aquamarine—sometimes transparent, sometimes dense and opaque—converse with touches of antique rose, gold, and smoky gray, creating a chromatic tension that reflects the island’s duality: paradise and prison, refuge and isolation. The textures invite the gaze to lose itself, just as Ulysses was lost for seven years in that enchanted, inescapable place.
Each brushstroke is a wave that erases and rewrites history, each layer of color is a day passing in Ogygia’s eternity. The Island of Calypso perfectly encapsulates Barbara Pastorino’s artistic research, which explores ancient classical myths through abstraction.
