Heteras

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

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

Often disconnected from reality, she flies toward far horizons, in time and space. For years she has awaited the return of her little Persian furry one with yellow eyes.

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

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

She loves staying in her den, a study casket 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 soothing voice of the red-haired Loreena McKennitt.

Love That Never Dies, The Hairdresser’s Husband, and the footlights are the psychological films she holds dear.

She collects vintage headpieces and devours books for breakfast. Favorite reads? Hillman, Jodorowsky, Jung.

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

She is moved watching a flower or a tree, so much that she kisses them.

She follows a healthy diet even if she eats too much chocolate and drinks coffee at will. Her dual relationship with the cosmos is visible also with food. She alternates greediness and loss of appetite.

She adores solitude and her universe, but she 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 she is ready to dive into new warm embraces.

No biological children, but many paintings as children: some in her studio, others she has set free to fly around the planet. Behind every painting she draws an eight symbolizing infinity.

The art of Èteras, poetic, delicate, melodramatic, touches the recesses of heart and soul. It booms inside like a silent echo, urges inner and outer listening, and draws you in 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 to admire it and feel it.

A very troubled life, rich in twists, pleasant experiences and great suffering, 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)

Originally from Montemarano and Roman by adoption, she lives in her home-workshop on the Costa dei Trabocchi, in Abruzzo.

The euphoria of the milestone of every little girl’s first steps vanishes with her parents’ decision to put an end to their love story. Èteras feels the earth tremble under her little feet. And then, to protect her, the giant arms of her superheroes arrive: her grandparents.

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 she steals notebooks from her older brother precisely because she wanted to draw.

In secret from everyone, already in adolescence, she frequents the painters’ workshops on 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 road accident disfigures her face, forcing her to leave that world so far from her, but nothing ever happens by chance. Her guiding spirit whispers to her to paint, and she never stops listening.

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

A troubled Love, hard to accept because of the age difference, yet it blossoms in all its splendor.
Happy and content, they live carefree years with great professional success and fine projects achieved.

They leave Rome in search of a more authentic life. They choose Abruzzo.
With prestige they shape life and works, widening their horizon toward 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 icy, unexpected rain that hits hard, frightens, and in the end destroys and overwhelms.

Shattered, upset, staggering, she paints, yes, she colors, gripping the tools of painting to fight with her voice choked in her throat and rebuild, in small sips, her inner home.

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

Knocked flat, with strokes of pencils and brushes, with her rich palette she manages to blend and transform anguishing events into canvases of a thousand shades—warm, cold, bright and blurred, dazzling and shadowy.

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


Her art.

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

Her paintings shout 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 curandera, sensuality, extravagance, being born and dying, the journey of those who go and those who stay, the bond with nature and the earth, generating.

Over the years her painting technique becomes more refined. Already rich in color, it becomes vibrant with shifting tones, flowing in a thousand nuances.

The first true work, the still life, with a different key, at 18. 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. Thus come to light the Dolls with bottle heads, where she tells the fleeting moment and life that wins over death.

She glimpses human silhouettes in landscapes, in flowers transformation, in the sun being born and dying, in woman the bond with Mother Earth and Sister Moon.

Her mannequins are not still and fixed, but animated with features of strong personality, rare elegance and sophisticated beauty.

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

Her commissioned works are an authentic furnishing object—original, unique—a memory that does not stay shut in a drawer, to be looked at and lived with every day.

Artist 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 gaze turned toward interiority and the deep values of existence. I like to stimulate in the observer an introspective analysis, communicating what I observe and the emotions I feel.

Even with artistic influences, I illustrate several aspects at the same time with a new and original vision.
First and foremost inspired by Pasquale Verrusio, my master and soulmate.
From his style I moved away so as not to be overwhelmed at the start.

After the trip to America, new themes of American landscapes are born, infected 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 metamorphoses, American landscapes, mannequins, glass panes, flowers in their vigor and withered, death, shamanism, night landscapes, the sun at birth and at dying, the third eye, the phases of woman and commissioned themes.

The bottles with doll heads are my debut. When one of them remains 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 teased by observing landscapes in which I glimpse human figures.

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

In the mannequins there is an overturning of a situation: they take on a human aspect, advance toward the viewer, showing 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 glass panes, the interior and the exterior reflected on them cancel a natural space, imposing a metaphysical space. Everything becomes, in the multiplicity of the one and the one in the multiplicity of the whole, and the figures frayed by light are in absence-presence, in dreamlike form.

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

Death has always aroused fear. I approached this theme to soothe the pain after my husband’s disappearance. 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 Fon Franz, James Hilman, 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 fascinated by the exploration of other dimensions between visible and invisible. In me emerges the desire for personal growth that I would like to transmit to the world.

The phases of woman, linked to the moon, I explain them from gestation to represent the strong bond with the earth. Woman has the power to generate and to put down roots.