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Original, One of a Kind

About This Piece
Aculina’s Painting Hermes presents an antithetical tension between dynamism and immobility. The artist draws from the inexhaustible source of her Greek heritage to find her subject: the Greek God Hermes, the messenger, incarnation of speed and communication. The subject lends itself to forceful and dynamic brushwork, one envisions perhaps a DeKooning, where the speed of the brush supersedes even the subject matter. But Aculina, ever recalcitrant, defies expectations. Her composition is stabilized by a vertical pole intersecting a placid horizon. This overarching element freezes motion in the picture plane and creates stillness where we expect dynamic movement. In the background we see a hill surmounted with a myriad of white crosses, these tiny elements echo the overriding initial theme.

Suddenly the representation coalesces. We are looking at a graveyard and the pole in the foreground is a flagpole. We witness the grim harvest of war, the utter antithesis of Hermes. No communication is possible, all speed has been nullified. Yet between the foreground flagpole and the background graveyard, Aculina has painted an ephemeral shimmering object. It is a blue arch, but it has nothing in common with triumphal Napoleonic architecture. It is soft, radiant, unstable- a flowing gateway and a barrier against the graveyard. In its shifting, multifarious form we see the spirit of Hermes for the first time in the painting. Vapor writhes away from the blue gate and forms animal shapes. For a moment we glimpse the elegant curve of a swan’s neck. On guard against the unifying compulsion of the flag and the assimilating sameness of the grave stands a variable, radiant object, forever in flux- The spirit of Hermes. Life prevails between the rock and the hard place: politics and war. Aculina’s work is a testament to the dynamism of the individual and the possibility of mercurial creative freedom within circumstances of constraint.

- Mixed media including acrylic, soft pastel, oil pastel and Ink