Verticalities
Verticalities | Work in progress
Contemporary abstract art triptych
Three canvases, 120 × 40 cm each
Oil and oil pastels on canvas
Linda Barnini | Original art
Three vertical panels traversed by lines. In the first, the lines appear scattered, like isolated signals marking points of attention in space. In the second, they tilt, cross, and begin to move, and the eye moves with them. In the third, darkness takes over the surface and the luminous lines multiply until they form a single dominant direction, like landing strips that show a path without revealing the destination.
The journey ends where the work began.
Verticalities is born from the poet’s eye (Thunbergia alata), a flower with five orange petals and a dark center. Looking closely at its interior, I discovered a black and violet cone, deep as an entrance, crossed by fine pale lines that draw the eye toward the center. I wasn’t seeing just a flower: I was seeing a threshold, a direction, an invitation to enter.
That observation gave rise to a series of studies on the number five and the pentagon. This work emerged from the third of them: the pentagon disappears, but the lines remain. The intense orange of the petals becomes the background. The black and violet of the flower’s throat form the body and structure of the composition. The third panel is the complete abstraction of that dark cone, and in the other two its lines reappear in fragments, turned into signals within the pictorial space.
The flower is no longer recognizable, but its structure is still there. For me, to abstract is to observe, select, and synthesize. Abstraction is not moving away from nature, but drawing closer to its essence.
Studies for Verticalities.
Three studies on the pentagon and the poet’s eye. In the first, the flower still radiates from its center. In the second, the pentagons scatter like a constellation. In the third, the form dissolves into vertical marks and diagonal planes. The triptych was born from that third study.
