Isabelle Vrinat
I Found Myself in a Dark Wood (2011–2017)
“Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
from the straight road and woke to find myself
alone in a dark wood.”
Dante, Inferno, canto 1 (Translated by John Ciardi)
What does Dante’s Divine Comedy, written in the early fourteenth century, have to say to us today? How does it continue to move us, to question us about our emotions, our fears and anxieties, but also our impulses and aspirations?
How does it resonate with particular intensity in our own age of uncertainty and violence, when we may feel, perhaps more acutely than at other times, that we have lost our way and no longer know where we are going?
Do we not, too, feel somewhat lost today?
These were the questions I asked myself while painting and drawing a narrative body of work — paintings, drawings and ink monotypes — inspired by Dante and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, between 2011 and 2017.
These works also tell stories of inner states — my own, as I stood before the canvas. I Found Myself in a Dark Wood is also an intimate journal of my doubts, anxieties, inner conflicts, impulses and desires, as well as of the paintings and texts that inspired me and nourished my imagery.
Entering the Dark Wood (2015-2017)
Dante, Inferno, Canto I
Translated by James Romanes Sibbald
In middle of the journey of our days
I found that I was in a darksome wood—
The right road lost and vanished in the maze.Ah me! how hard to make it understood
How rough that wood was, wild, and terrible:
By the mere thought my terror is renewed.(…)
And lo! ere I had well beginning made,
A nimble leopard, light upon her feet,
And in a skin all spotted o’er arrayed:(…)
A she-wolf, too, beheld I further on;
All kinds of lust seemed in her leanness pent:
Through her, ere now, much folk have misery known.
Dante, Inferno, Canto III, 82–87 — Charon
Translated by James Romanes Sibbald
And toward us, lo, within a boat,
An old man, white with ancient hair, draws nigh,
Shouting: “Woe to you, souls of evil note!
Hope not that Heaven shall ever meet your eye:
I come to take you to the other strand,
Where heat and frost are, and eternal night.”
Circle I — Paradise Lost (Childhoods): “Madam, I’m Afraid of the Wolf Too.” (2014)
Circle II — Metamorphoses: Inner Conflicts and Confinement (2011–2015)
The forest as a theatre of metamorphoses, entered by winding, unexpected paths; a place of strange encounters at unforeseen crossroads, a place where childhood fears lurk behind a dark thicket; a place of every possible transformation — from human into plant, from human into animal; where we no longer know what remains human and what has become animal in this strange fusion, where one can be both human and beast; where the most animal, the most violent passions may suddenly assail you and make you their prey.
Ah, how can we escape our demons?
Who, walking through a forest, has not suddenly been seized by the fear of becoming lost, of disappearing?
A true labyrinth of intertwined branches, where we risk losing our way… to lose ourselves “midway in the journey of our life,” as Dante tells us; to lose ourselves deliberately — in play, perhaps, or for pleasure? — in the vertigo of all the possible paths… perhaps in order to find ourselves, through painting.
Or simply to find ourselves within painting itself — itself an interweaving of marks and colours…
Metamorphosis I: Narcissus
To desire what cannot be embraced: such is the tragedy of Narcissus, in love with his own image. The closer he moves towards his reflection in the water, the more he believes he can grasp it; the more he tries to touch it, the further it slips away, unattainable, vanishing beneath his hand.
And Narcissus gazes at his image in a state of extraordinary tension — the tension of the desire to love oneself, to understand oneself through looking, to take hold of oneself; the desire to “break through the crystal in the hope of being reborn / Other.” A desire that can never be fulfilled…
Is this not also the painter’s predicament: to fall in love with an image into which, in a single instant, one longs to place everything — an ideal synthesis of every thought and sensation — and to find oneself unable to detach from the image one is creating?
Narcissus as a metaphor for the act of painting?
Metamorphosis II: Actaeon and His Demons
Actaeon, the hunter condemned to be transformed into a stag, is devoured by his own hounds.
Metamorphosis III: The Minotaur
A pensive Minotaur devours himself, imprisoned within his inner labyrinth, deep in the woods.
Half man, half animal, like Actaeon, the Minotaur is himself a dark labyrinth…
Could it be that the Monster, lurking in the depths of darkness, exists only for the one who looks upon it — and dares to confront it?
Beware anyone who ventures to open the door to his labyrinth!
Circle III: In the Heart of the Dark Wood (2015–2017)
Painting conceived as a dark wood in which we lose our way, struggle, and can see nothing; where we fear what might emerge from the darkness and hope for a guide who will show us the right path and lead us out of our bewilderment…
Or perhaps we must plunge into the darkness in the hope of finding light when we emerge from the wood — if there is a way out at all…
How can we know?
Dante, Inferno, Canto XXXII, 40–45
Translated by James Romanes Sibbald
And having somewhat gazed around me there
I to my feet looked down, and saw two pressed
So close together, tangled was their hair,
‘Say, who are you with breast thus strained to breast?’
I asked; whereon their necks they backward bent,
And when their upturned faces lay at rest
Circle IV: Metamorphoses of Desire — Sylvan Eros (2017)
Ravishments (or Abductions)
The dark wood as a place of desire, ravishment and abduction: nymphs pursued, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, by the gods’ violent desire, transforming themselves into plants and trees in order to escape them; a goddess surprised while bathing by hunters such as Actaeon — unless, perhaps, she deliberately exposes herself to the voyeur’s gaze, hastening his transformation into a stag?
Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book III — Actaeon
Translated by Henry Thomas Riley
“And while the Titanian Goddess was there bathing in the wonted stream, behold! the grandson of Cadmus, having deferred the remainder of his sport till next day, came into the grove, wandering through the unknown wood, with uncertain steps; thus did his fate direct him.
Soon as he entered the grotto, dropping with its springs, the Nymphs, naked as they were, on seeing a man, smote their breasts, and filled all the woods with sudden shrieks […]
The color that is wont to be in clouds, tinted by the rays of the sun when opposite, or that of the ruddy morning, was on the features of Diana, when seen without her garments.”
Pierre Klossowski, Le Bain de Diane (Diana at Her Bath)
“"Could there be a more extraordinary vision than the one revealed to Actaeon through the parted leaves? Is he truly dreaming so intensely at midday, to the sound of the hunting horn? Was it chance, or a groping desire, that guided his steps along the path to salvation, at the very heart of the curse?”
Circle V : Leaving the Dark Wood: The Flight and Fall of Icarus (2015–2017)
Who will guide us out of the dark wood, “pure and prepared to rise up to the stars”? (Dante, Purgatorio, Canto XXXIII)
What other way is there out of the labyrinth, then, but to gather momentum and run, escaping the dark wood — and, through that very impulse, breaking free from what devours us…
Icarus, the winged man, the bird-man, like an angel, begins to run across the fields, hoping to take flight in a moment of sheer exhilaration, to embrace the light by piercing the darkness, to cleave through the space that has finally opened before him — at the risk of falling.
