By opening the doors of her studio, Barbara Bianchi opens us the gates of the maritime hell, such as lived for centuries thousands of men and women, hardened or not, to the art of navigation. Sailors, migrants, adventurers, the artist brings back to remembrance these individual and collective dramas, these anonymous deaths for the greater part, by paying tribute in a series of structures unveiling a “worried geometry”. Capsizing ships by day or capsized ships by night, these precarious-balanced  structures which describe in a minimalist aesthetics countless tragedies are - in a more tacit way - a reflection on the pictorial practice of the artist who, guided by her lucky star, embarks in a fragile vessel on the tempestuous ocean of art. It is in this sense that the artist speaks about her structures as a real “Anatomy of melancholy”.

These freely recomposed frames which express the precariousness of these makeshift boats, wink of Theodore Gericault’s the raft of the Méduse, take up with a rudimentary and reductionist artistic practice. With this whole plastic vocabulary, elements gleaned along with the current, the aim is to fix these countless wrecks on the walls of the studio as Rimbaud fixed dizziness in its poems. More fundamentally the purpose is to attribute to each of these structures a value of votive offering. Out of Place is this sanctuary of rest where commune with oneself the close relations of the persons lost at sea, reference to all the castaways: fully-licensed captains, minor sailors, citizens of second zone, unfortunate migrants having lost their lives in the seas of the world.

Olivia Bianchi