Eleonora Meier

The series, consisting of eight paintings of different formats, represents a single train of thought for the artist. As a title, Eleonora Meier has chosen a concise oxymoron, The Softest Hard - a rhetorical stylistic device consisting of the paradoxical composition of terms with opposite meanings. In this case, it is "softness" and "hardness" that clash in Meier's compositions. They find expression especially in the interplay of objects, materials, and unreal beings, intensifying the dreamlike character of the works. This culminates in the large-format paintings, in which the artist combines the colorful luminosity of watercolor painting with the rather somber effect of pencil on paper. The motifs of the graphite drawings oscillate between gothic and comic, lending the paintings an almost sinister mood that blurs the thin line between dream and nightmare. Delicacy and hardness are also reflected in the recurring motif of the glove. Usually gloves have a protective and enveloping function. In both cases they function as a link between body and space nd are intended to evoke associations ranging from medicine to glamour to pornography.

Irene Grillo

The series Touch Me With Your Breath (2023) is based on a formal examination of motifs from traditional Swiss wooden shutters. The artist processes these motifs with a bright color palette typical for her work. In the midst of the cheerful-looking patterns and colors, sad, almost weeping faces can be discovered, hidden in places by light-colored curtains. Streams of tears seem to flow from wide-open eyes in the form of oval orifices, taking on unusual shapes of dangling hands. The discrepancy between form and content is striking here. It evokes contradictory feelings in the viewer and leads to a general uncertainty regarding both the reading of the work and the viewer's own sensibilities.

Irene Grillo

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When it comes, the landscape listens, series, 2022

 

When it comes, the Landscape listens –

Shadows – hold their breath –

When it goes, ‘tis like the Distance

On the look of Death –

(Emily Dickinson, 1861)

 

Both poetry and painting are known to employ figurative strategies to render the strange as something familiar and the familiar as something strange. To take words and images we think we know and harvest them for their potential ambiguity; taking us into rooms in our own minds we have never seen before. The title for this series of paintings is taken from an Emily Dickinson poem written in 1861, it is one of her most famous and transcendent pieces and well displays her uncanny brilliance in capturing an effervescent and sublime form of knowing that shivers just beyond our grasp. She binds nouns to verbs they have no business with in any rational sense, takes poetic personification to alchemical heights, transubstantiating landscapes and shadows into listening breathing entities, wielding words like spells, a metaphysical mage. 

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“I’ll Miss Myself So Bad When I Die”, series, 2019-2020

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Clarice Lispector died  the year I was born, 1977.  I like to think of it as a special connection.
In her last book, The Hour Of The Star, Clarice Lispector deals with themes of sexism, identity and poverty.
Narrated by the worldly Rodrigo S.M., the novel follows the object of his obsession, the frail and destitute Macabéa, a young, underfed and unloved typist living in the slums of Rio. Rodrigo is horrified by her circumstances, but fascinated by the idea that she is, despite it all, a free soul. She leads a difficult life, but seems to be oblivious to this fact. She starts dating a boy named Olímpico, who mistreats her and eventually leaves her for her coworker, Gloria. Feeling guilty, Gloria recommends that Macabéa visit a fortune teller named Madame Carlota. She predicts that Macabéa’s life will soon turn around, saying that she will be rich, happy, and marry a foreigner named Hans. However, none of this comes true as Macabéa’s life comes to an abrupt end when a yellow Mercedes runs her over.
Macabéas last words while exhaling are “I’ll Miss Myself So Bad When I Die”. Though the novel focuses intently on the looming spectre of death, the author was unaware that she was dying at the time.
I am very attracted and deeply touched by these tragedies and the comic side of it.
In this series I am, for the first time, putting my own body and its brutal vulnerability at the centre of the stage.