Isidora
This is one of three works from Rua’s series inspired by Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel, Invisible Cities, which finds Marco Polo speaking to Kublai Khan about his travels throughout the wondrous and surreal cities under the Khan’s possession. Visualizing these imaginative cities using Marco Polo’s descriptions, Rua has created a series of color pencil works on paper that portray the special qualities of each environment.
In Isidora, we see a city portrayed by its noteworthy spiraling staircases. Different variations of these staircases are proposed by Rua, each of which finds itself aimlessly spiraling throughout a perplex series of rooms and halls. These imagined cities and their inventive descriptions have acted as significant sources of inspiration for the artist’s world-building process.
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