Description
‘Fidele Signaculum’ by Petra Frankova
Artist: Petra Frankova
Title: ‘Fidele Signaculum’
Medium: Chalk, graphite, and colour pencil on 250gsm Stonehenge cotton paper
Dimensions: 4″ x 4″
Framing: Unframed
Year of Creation: 2024
About the Artwork:
There is an exquisite piece of medieval Latin poetry, by the infidelity of Fortune somehow forgotten. Alanus ab Insulis, great 12th century theologian, philosopher, and poet, has once written in his relative seclusion the poem that gave name to this piece of artwork (as he was perhaps gazing into his own eyes deformed by an old age, his features by shades, and his intellect by whispering of flies, earwigs, woodworm and maggots).
The creatures of this earth
are a book and a painting
and a mirror of our being.
To our life, our death,
our situation, our lot
they are faithful signs (fidele signaculum).
-translated by Turba Delirantium-
And this half-woman, half-insect is a faithful sign of something in me, in my surroundings, in everyone. A smile of a man and a silent screech of a monster, together in their corporal harmony, breading new generation of glorious hybrids.
About the Artist:
(Artist Bio)
Petra is a traditional printmaker and illustrator from Czech Republic.
Her universe is one of almost tyrannical, symbolist harmony. The meticulous attention to detail combined with the unnamed feeling behind words, senses and meaning. Quiet, unmoving, perpetual gazing upon something charmingly familiar, yet strangely and deeply foreign. Alien, ambiguous, disconnected from our expectations and challenging ordinary perception – creatures humming silently, in their shattered words of dread and eeriness.