Delicious Line
Anne Russinof
Excerpt from “Hauntings at FiveMyles,” by Elizabeth Johnson, April, 2020
“… Barbara Friedman visited Pinacoteca di Brera museum, in Milan, and decided to borrow the background portion of Liberale da Verona’s Renaissance portrait of St. Sebastian: perched in balconies, small women converse at crotch level on either side of the large saint. This scene found its way into her painting, Hard Rain, which is painted over Castle in the Sky, an earlier work that floats a dreamy castle in a hopeful void. Hard Rain is foreboding: as fog consumes the castle, the women–recontextualized as a jury–decide the fate of a young, male supplicant. The women seem to act as one, they communicate without speaking, they guard an unreachable mystical goal.
As she works, Friedman remains neutral toward her characters, letting them surprise her with their changes. About the women in Hard Rain, she says, “the women aren’t reaching out to help him, or at least they aren’t yet, and of course, they still might do so. He’s male and probably an intruder of some sort. He seems young and vulnerable–much more so than I intended him to be.” A related painting featuring the same chorus of women, Renaissance Penis, freed her to remove St. Sebastian’s loincloth and reveal a large, dangling penis. She continues, “In both paintings I feel for these women; they come out on their balconies into a haunted world: either some guy is hanging off the rails or they’re face to face with a penis... I feel for the guy, too.”
http://deliciousline.org/dq/content/2020-04-22T1411/