Èteras

Wear this mysterious name with elegance, enchanted by its sounds that emanate sensuality, freedom but also spirituality and quintessence.

Brown colors, freckles on the face, colorful glasses, flashy hats or extravagant headbands.
She flaunts the mask of the chatterbox who appears self-confident to hide her delicate shyness.

Often disconnected from reality, she flies towards distant horizons, in time and space. For years she has been waiting for the return of her little Persian pet with yellow eyes.

She seems like an ancient priestess with prophetic dreams and visionary powers. Since she was a child, she sees herself flying while she sleeps.

Some paintings she imagines before her eyes. In others, there is a supernatural force that drives her to create them.

She loves being in her den, a study chest immersed in greenery and covered with works, halfway between sky and sea.

She paints while meditating and listening to classical music. She reaches ecstasy with Queen and the seductive voice of the red-haired Loreena McKennitt.

The love that never dies, the hairdresser's husband, and the limelight are the psychological films she holds dear.

She collects vintage headgear and devours books for breakfast. Favorite readings? Hillman, Jodorowsky, Jung.

Red is her color and long walks in nature with her sweet little Maltese, Giotto, her favorite hobby.

She is moved by looking at a flower or a tree so much that she kisses them.

She follows a healthy diet even though she eats too much chocolate and drinks coffee at will. Her dualistic relationship with the cosmos is also visible with food. She alternates between gluttony and lack of appetite.

She loves solitude and her universe but is kind, cordial, hospitable and does not disdain dinners in good company.
If she meets hostile people, she blows the wind with her hands to chase away negativity.

She has known great Love, the true one, but is ready to dive into new warm embraces.

No biological children but many paintings as children, some in her studio, others she has let fly free around the planet. Behind each painting, she draws an eight that symbolizes infinity.

The art of Èteras, poetic, delicate, melodramatic, touches the recesses of the heart and soul. It resounds inside like a silent echo, pushes for inner and outer listening, and involves with an ancestral atmosphere.

Her painting is like magic, a psychological art, therapeutic for her who creates it and for many of us who have the honor of admiring and feeling it.

A very troubled life, full of twists, pleasant experiences and great sufferings, dark moments and deep solitude. One of those lives that fascinates anyone who comes into contact with it.

https://www.eterasverrusio.com/

The story of Èteras (Biography of Teresa Pennetti)

Montemaranese by origin and Roman by adoption, she lives in her home-studio on the Trabocchi coast, in Abruzzo.

The euphoria of the first steps of every little girl vanishes with her parents' decision to end their love story. Èteras feels the earth tremble under her little feet. And here come the giant arms of her superheroes, her grandparents, to protect her.

Disobedient, she runs away from her mother as soon as she comes of age to fulfill her childhood dream, to become a famous painter. At 4 years old, she steals her older brother's notebooks precisely because she wanted to draw.

In secret from everyone, already as a teenager, she frequents the painters' workshops in Via Margutta in Rome while to make a living she rides the planet of fashion and cinema where she does not feel at ease.

A terrible car accident disfigures her face, forcing her to leave that world so distant from her, but nothing ever happens by chance. Her guiding spirit whispers to her to paint and she never stops listening to it.

There is a Roman party, after a group exhibition in Tropea.
Winged Cupid launches his powerful arrow of Love and strikes Èteras and the famous artist Pasquale Verrusio. Struck at once, shocked in work and in life. He becomes her master, poetic guide, and soulmate. She becomes his muse, student, and life companion.

A troubled and difficult Love to accept due to the age difference, but it blossoms in all its splendor.
Happy and content, they live carefree years with great professional successes and beautiful projects realized.

They leave Rome in search of a more authentic life. They choose Abruzzo.
They shape their life and works with prestige, deepening their horizon towards the doors of the United States, Switzerland, Germany, and Austria.

Suddenly, like a summer storm, in a flash his illness darkens their lives, without asking permission like an unexpected, icy rain that hits hard, frightens, and in the end destroys and overwhelms.

Broken, devastated, staggering, she paints, yes, colors, grabbing the tools of painting to fight with her voice choked in her throat and to slowly rebuild her inner home.

She makes it and survives through her art even when, a few months after her husband's death, she is overwhelmed by a tsunami of frightening energy: the sudden death of her father.
At the mercy of the wave that surprised her, she manages to stay afloat, albeit breathless.

On the ground, stunned, with strokes of pencils and brushes, she manages with her rich palette to mix and transform distressing events into canvases of a thousand shades, warm, cold, bright and blurred, dazzling and dark.

Far from the art scene for years to properly heal her wounds, she is now ready to return to the scene in art galleries with events and exhibitions dedicated to her and Pasquale.


Her art.

To call her a painter is reductive.
Èteras is talented, original, and visionary.

Her paintings scream deep themes so dear to the imaginal sphere: the eternal feminine, death in an esoteric-shamanic key, life beyond life, the fleeting moment, victory over death, the visible and the invisible, the third eye, shadows and lights, yin and yang, the soulmate, the healer, sensuality, extravagance, birth and death, the journey of those who go and those who stay, the bond with nature and the earth, generating.

Over the years her painting technique has refined. Already rich in color, it becomes vibrant with iridescent tones, flowing in a thousand shades.

The first real work, the still life, with a different key, at 18 years old. The first portrait, her grandmother, at 19.

Finding a doll with a decapitated head, to give it life again, she replaces its body with a bottle of Lambrusco. The Dolls with bottle heads are born, where she tells the fleeting moment and life that triumphs over death.

She glimpses human shapes in landscapes, in flowers transformation, in the sun birth and death, in women the bond with Mother Earth and Sister Moon.

Her mannequins are not immobile and fixed, but animated with strong personalities, of rare elegance and sophisticated beauty.

She plays with her reflected images through mirrored windows that shatter and recombine with others, going beyond the simple eye. Beyond the transparencies there is a wonderful universe. Like a prism, different planes seem to overlap and the figures emerge as if dematerialized from their physicality, leaving the unexpected to the imagination.

Her commissioned works are an authentic, original, unique piece of furniture, a memory that does not remain closed in a drawer but to be looked at and lived every day.

Artist's Statement (interview)

Why do I paint? I feel within me the strong call of the daimon. It is the mission of my soul. Since I was a child, I have had the feeling that through art one can express transcendental sensations.

What is the message of my works? A look turned towards interiority and the deep values of existence. I like to stimulate in the observer an introspective analysis by communicating what I observe and the emotions I feel.

Even with artistic influences, I illustrate several aspects at once with a new and original vision.
First and foremost inspired by Pasquale Verrusio, my master and soulmate.
I distanced myself from his style so as not to be overwhelmed from the start.

After the trip to America, new themes of American landscapes are born, influenced by Hopper's hyperrealism.

In the heart of Europe, I delve into themes under the influence of the avant-gardes such as futurism, cubism, and German expressionism.

What themes are addressed? Bottles with doll heads, body-landscape metamorphosis, American landscapes, mannequins, stained glass, flowers in their vigor and wilted, death, shamanism, night landscapes, the sun at birth and at death, the third eye, the phases of women, and commissioned themes.

The bottles with doll heads are my debut. When one of them is left without a body, as if decapitated, I am inspired to replace its body with a dark bottle of Lambrusco. It is the victory of life over death. From there, a series of surreal works around this theme.

In body-landscape metamorphoses, my creativity is stimulated by observing landscapes in which I glimpse human figures.

In American Landscapes, I have described skiers in cabins reflected on windows with scenes of American life, Monument Valley, Utah, country characters.

In the mannequins there is a reversal of a situation, they take on a human aspect, advance towards the viewer manifesting themselves in all their vanity and beauty, leaving behind their eternal fixity.

The soulmate, the nocturnal apparition, the third eye are esoteric themes.

In the stained glass, the interior and the exterior reflected on them cancel a natural space by imposing a metaphysical space. Everything becomes in the multiplicity of the one and the one in the multiplicity of everything, and the figures, blurred by the light, are in absence-presence, in a dreamlike form.

My flowers always bloom at the moment of their maximum splendor or incipient decay.

Death has always aroused fear. I approached this theme to ease the pain after the disappearance of my husband. Seeking answers through readings on the meaning of life, such as the Tibetan Book of the Dead by Bardo Thodol and various texts by Marie Louise Von Franz, James Hillman, Jung, Osho, Hellinger, etc., I discovered new horizons. I begin to look at the phenomenon of death not as a drama, but as a moment of dimensional passage, a transmigration, a journey. Not an end, but a continuity beyond life.

I delve into shamanism because I am fascinated by the exploration of other dimensions between the visible and the invisible. The desire for personal growth emerges in me, which I would like to transmit to the world.

The phases of women, linked to the moon, I explain from gestation to represent the strong bond with the earth. Women have the power to generate and put down roots.