by Barbara d'Antuono

An Italian national, Barbara d’Antuono arrived in Corsica aged seven. She lived there until the eighties when she leaves for the West Indies. She travels around the islands, via Jamaica, and stops off in Haiti where she spends the next five years. Immersed in the rich, expanding artistic environment in Haiti, Barbara discovers painting and sculpture. She attends the Haitian painter Ronald Meus’s studio regularly. Her artistic path starts with Outsider Art, wood and bone assemblage, totem collages, fetishes...Babette El Saieh, the great collector Issa El Saieh’s daughter, gives Barbara her first exhibition in the Hotel Olofson, Port-au-Prince. Subsequently, Barbara’s work is exhibited regularly in Haiti. In 1986 she moves to France and starts developing her own technique. A multi-faceted artist, her work encompasses sculpture, painting, graphics, poetry and music. Barbara is a globetrotter, nourishing her imagination with journeys to Africa where she finds ancestral voodoo, particularly in Benin and Togo, and the Tamberma valley. This spicy mixture produces the dreamlike, colourful, sometimes naïve, style that permeates all her work. Barbara shares her global encounters and discoveries, while always leaving a free space for our imagination. Her favourite themes are Voodoo, Africa, diversity, life and death issues. Barbara’s creativity springs from her imagination. She points to a path, then it’s up to us to make our own way. It’s difficult to pigeonhole Barbara in conventional art movements. She fits somewhere between Outsider Art, Art Singulier (Marginal Art), Underground Art. Some people see Dada and Surrealist influences in her work, and the spirit of Basquiat too. From 1995, Barbara has exhibited her work regularly in Paris, and also in Germany. She has participated in several group shows, including a tribute to Wilfredo Lam at Unesco. And from 1998, she has become a well-known artist with the Gallery Art Factory, and then the Galerie l’Art de Rien.She has had several shows in the Lavoir Moderne Parisien and the Chapelle du Collège de Carpentras. In 2012, she had an exhibition in the Galerie Electron Libres, based on Haitian Voodoo. Back to roots. In 2013, she distances herself temporarily from figurative work and explores lyrical abstract art. The “people” disappear and make way for more abstract forms, creating elements of absurd mechanisms with implausible purposes, and strange, poetic cities to be build and demolished. n 2014, her “people” reappear in interactive groups. These minimalistic graphics are like a humorous reference to Barbara’s first artistic encounter: Outsider Art. Thus whatever the spirit that inspires Barbara’s work, the “people”, the human element, are always the sentries to her creative worl