WEM EDITORIAL #4 CHIARA DYNYS
Self (2021)
WEM -Empowering Art Platform is pleased to announce the Self (2021) series by the artist Chiara Dynys. The series is one of her last projectand it’s deeply connected with her intimate research around identity and the idea of self. The artwork is now part of her last solo show “Chiara Dynys. Melancholia”, curated by Alessandro Castiglioni at MA*GA Museum, Italy.
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“I really enjoyed resuming painting after many years. In this case, I was interested in imagining synthetic portraits, in which everyone could imagine finding their own”. Chiara Dynys
The Self (2022) series came from Chiara Dynys’ extensive artistic research into the idea of the identity. This artwork finds his roots in those languages and characteristic elements in the artist’s work concern the exploration of the self and its perception. Usually working with mirrors and optical devices, she explores the ambiguous nature of the representations, transforming her artworks in a sort of “trap”, in which seeing oneself does not lead to recognizing oneself.
In addition, the artwork particularly epitomizes the artist’s career rediscovering a language deeply connected with the origin of the Dynys artistic work: the painting. Painting was the very starting point of Chiara Dynys research and to use the words of the Italian Art Critic and Curator Achille Bonito Oliva “In Chiara Dynys paining the broad application of color takes possession and forms the space of the painting that evokes itself, described in terms of its bidimensional phenomenology. It is placed according to the sense of the frontality of the material that condenses the double position of the work and the viewer […] Dynys does not believe in abstraction as a process of estrangement, but as a movement that passes through time and represents the spatial coagulation of matter and gesture.” [1]
In the multiple Self, we can find lots of key elements of her research: the returning of the paining, the use of the mirror as a metaphor of the investigation of the self and abstraction as key to passes through time and space, through different dimensions.
The curator of the exhibition at MA*GA Museum Alessandro Castiglioni explains: “These Self are, after all, mirrors “in less”. Our image, multiplied by the screens of contemporaneity, resets, and proliferates at the same time. The pictorial field, infact, is clear, uniform, even if we are not able to understand if it is an erasure or a concealment, now embellished by gold, now by silver, now by titanium or copper, but we notice only a small letter that appears, colored, in the corner of each canvas. Only 4 canvases together can constitute one of the units of the work.”
The artwork is a multiple in edition of 100, composed of 4 monochrome canvases representing an ideal mirror. The canvases, created using dense textured brushstrokes, contain 4 letters, S/E/L/F, which are subsequently recomposed using colours, different for each letter in each painting. Each canvas thus becomes a metaphorical mirror and each of its variants presents unique, different characteristics: 100 possible solutions of the self.
[1] Achille Bonito Oliva A. Bonito Oliva, Chiara Dynys, in Chiara Dynys, catalogo della mostra (Firenze, Galleria Vivita 2,31 gennaio –14 marzo 1987), Milano, 1987, pp. 7-9
