L’Eau endormie 

Curator: This is Léoonor Fini’s “L’Eau endormie,” a dreamlike landscape rendered in oil. Editor: Immediately, the immersive quality of the color pulls me in; everything seems to breathe with this otherworldly green. The materiality of the paint itself, applied in visible strokes, contributes to the sense of something alive and pulsating. Curator: Note how the lush application of oil paint contributes to the sense of verdant abundance. Fini plays with layering and density here to mimic the chaos of untamed nature, the type she favored throughout her life. Her choice of materials, her method of working them is an active defiance of tradition. Editor: And isn't it fascinating how the form emerges from this chaos? What seems at first glance an abstraction resolves into a kind of reclining figure near the bottom of the canvas, with a sort of statue or apparition of a figure towards the back. To me, that reclining figure calls up Ophelia from Hamlet or even a nymph from classical mythology. The symbols hint at feminine power entwined with nature, maybe with melancholy too, don’t you think? Curator: I find myself looking more closely at what the application and build-up of that material actually represents. We are not talking smooth, flawless depiction here, but thick strokes of oil and the very deliberate manipulation of her chosen media that allows the narrative that you find there to surface in the viewer’s mind. Editor: Perhaps her technical choices reflect a kind of anti-establishment position as a female artist and maybe her exploration of feminine mythology becomes more potent given those technical challenges to tradition. It certainly opens avenues to investigate gender, artistic identity and maybe female authority. Curator: A fitting insight! Considering that she actively flouted convention, refusing the restraints of gender and social mores, and we find similar defiance of those restraints in her visual vocabulary too. Editor: Absolutely, thank you. It's a landscape ripe with symbols, layered meanings, and questions that invite us to interpret not just with our eyes but also with our understanding of Fini herself.