Selene ed Endimione

The moon goddess and the sleeping shepherd — mythology in large format, drawn and sprayed.

Selene ed Endimione is a studio work by artist Neve, pencils and spray on MDF, 120 × 193 cm, created in 2017 for Galerie Bartoux.

"Selene ed Endimione" is a 2017 pencil drawing on wood made for Galerie Bartoux. The myth: Selene, goddess of the moon, saw the shepherd Endymion sleeping on a hillside and was overcome. She asked Zeus to grant him eternal sleep so that she might visit him night after night, forever — watching him, touching his face, loving someone who would never age and never wake. In some versions of the myth, Endymion himself had asked for immortal sleep, so that he might continue to observe the stars without interruption. He had sought the sky, and the sky came down to him. In Neve's version, Endymion lies at the bottom of the composition: shirtless, head thrown back, eyes closed, a deep red cloak across his body. In the crook of his arm, an armillary sphere — the instrument for mapping the celestial spheres, the astronomer's object — confirming that he fell asleep measuring the heavens. He is fully at rest, entirely given over to whatever this state is: sleep, or something beyond it. Selene leans over him from above — long blonde hair, feathered garments, her posture hovering between watchfulness and longing. She does not look at him. She looks up, toward the crescent moon that rests near her forehead as her attribute and her identity. She has found what she came for, and still she is looking at the sky. The composition is a vertical diagonal: woman descending from darkness into light, man horizontal in warmth below. The drawing language is Baroque — the deep blacks, the selective illumination, the sense of physical mass caught in a suspended moment. The armillary sphere gleams at the lower right: the cosmos held in his sleeping hands, and she who is the cosmos looking elsewhere.