WEM EDITORIAL #7 CHIARA DYNYS
Kaleidos (2020)
The Italian Artist Chiara Dynys doesn’t stop to deceive viewers’ perceptions. Now on show at MA*GA contemporary Art Museum, the Kaleidos (2020)series in “Melancholia”, her latest solo show curated by Alessandro Castiglioni.
“The mirror expresses the psychoanalytic and surrealist matrix of my work: shattered in this multitude of distorted images, we become aware of our longing for integrity”
Chiara Dynys
Kaleidos (2020)is deeply connected with Dynys’ intimate research around identity and the idea of representation. The series also embodiestwo central elements of her multidisciplinary activity: the relationship with space and the relationship with light.The sculptures present bright and vivid colors, embodying the accurate chromatic research behind Dynys artwork: an essential element that contributes to capturing the observer’s gaze. The sculptures are composed by mirrors,reflecting each other’s, which act as optical devices capable of fragmenting, altering, and disorienting the perception of vision. The use of mirror is a definitive sign of artist’s research, but never used in a traditional way.
“I always use the mirroras an element that hides something or, in any case, that in some way reflects the environment in a shattered manner or hides a writing. Therefore, the mirror is never something that traditionally reflects reality for me, but that betrays its presence.”Chiara Dynys
This sort of disorientation, of trying to cross a place, let’s say a threshold, a limit, is a condition that can be seen in many of Dynys’ works. According to the artist, looking in the mirror it doesn’t never match with recognize oneself, but, on contrary, construct narratives of labyrinths of strange perceptions that address the relationship with the idea of limits about questioning oneself
To use Alessandro Castiglioni’s words: “Like many other works by Dynys, the Kaleidos themselves areactually “object-systems”. I use this formula with a precise connotation and idea, namely sculptural and physical elements that contain internal devices such as a mirror, which fragment and recompose spaces, create labyrinths, rooms within rooms, apparitions, and deceptions.”
The reflected and fragmented images open the possibilities of the vision and becomes a question about one’s own identity: an invitation to look at oneself, to recognize oneself, to find oneself again. The relationship with reflection and light is empathized by the installation of the artworks during the exhibition, arranged to form the constellation Pleaides, one of the brightest one in the sky
As the curator says “Dynys reminds us that these reflections are also full of generative capacities. The daughters of Atlas and Vergiliae, the seven sisters of Greek mythology that rise in springtime, are heralds of the abundance of a new season.”
