(Furies)

In ancient Greek myth and in the plays of Aeschylus, the Erinyes, the Furies, were sent by the gods to punish those guilty of hubris—of dangerous, god-challenging pride. Here in these paintings, the opalescent surfaces of the water are punctuated by half-formed, inchoate shapes. What are these weird, these profoundly uneasy beings? Vaguely crustacean, nightmare lobsters, the crabs of delirium, but tentacular too, with flailing limbs that sprawl like the antennae and pedipalps of boot-crushed insects. “The bottom of the sea is cruel,” a poet wrote, and indeed, these things have crept from the cruelty of the coldest deeps, over the undersea mountains of the abyss, only to find themselves cast up on the pure “shores of light” of the canvas.

“Like all things from the sea, beautiful but deadly”
-Giuseppe di Lampedusa