The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison

In her response to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Marta Ibarrondo confronts the crushing weight of internalized self-hatred and the insidious power of unattainable beauty ideals. The novel, emotionally shattering in its quiet brutality, has remained, for Ibarrondo, an open wound. With each rereading, she is drawn deeper into Pecola’s fractured psyche, haunted by echoes of her own childhood longing to possess the blue eyes society had exalted.

To mirror the novel’s emotional texture, Ibarrondo works on weathered, hand-dyed blue paper and dirty vintage scraps, their worn surfaces embodying the grinding poverty and emotional neglect that define Pecola’s world. The roughness of charcoal and the layered interplay of matte and glossy black paint with vibrant blues conjure a visual language of bruised interiority. These materials do not merely illustrate, they ache. The resulting compositions become elegies to a stolen sense of self, where sorrow is sedimented into every fiber, and beauty remains a violent, unreachable fiction.