Study for Catullus I-VIII, 2023
Study for Catullus I-VIII, 2023
Monotype with hand-colouring in mixed media
Sheet/image 29.6 x 36.7 cm
Signed in pencil verso
Gaius Valerius Catullus (84 – 54BCE) was a major poet of the late Roman Republic whose appeal to poets and readers has continued to the present day. His enduring reputation rests on lyric poems, particularly those recounting his fraught love affair with a woman he called Lesbia, but this should not detract from his achievements in other forms such as elegy, the wedding hymn and the ‘mini-epic’, of which Poem 64 is the only example to have survived from antiquity. As a visual artist, Pacheco was drawn to the poem by its many dazzling scenes and the almost cinematic way in which time, place and mood shift, and expectations are raised and dashed. The poem touches on subjects and themes that permeate her graphic work: the labyrinth and the Minotaur, the place of women in Greek myth and the notion of heroism, for instance. These eight monotypes are studies towards a new collection of oils on paper by the artist for a new Artist’s Book. The images will be accompanied by selected extracts from Poem 64, both in the original Latin and in a new translation by Robert Bush. The Artist’s Book will be presented with an etching and accompanied by a booklet with the full text of the poem, again in the original Latin and new translation. Publication date to be confirmed.
