The CHIASSO location of the CACT – Centre of Contemporary Art in Canton Ticino – is opening a personal show dedicated to CHIARA DYNYS (IT 1958).

We have focused on several occasions on the concept of the mise en scène, the analytical mechanism that artists have always used to form their visual investigations of parallel and other worlds, first and foremost their own mise à nu, the process of stripping away the superfluous that applies their vision to the things that make up the world. Nevertheless, this is not enough to explain the topics in the exhibition that Chiara Dynys has entitled SIPARIO / CURTAINS (2009). This is link in a long design chain, in which every element used and the language spoken remind us forcefully of the dimension of the present, of a vision of society that is in some ways absurd, shot through with the here-and-now, consumerist, object-obsessed, branded by a sign pointing towards a dematerialised creativity, that perceives a potential threat in otherness, while nevertheless allowing us a glimpse, a perceptive margin of vision and virtual. How this chain develops also links to a balance – as feminine as it is strong – between past and present, teetering on the line that joins tradition to modernity, space to infinity. It is no coincidence that light remains one of the primary elements used to (re)define the notion of space, inexorably dragging that of form with it.
While in a past that was not so long ago artists used to feel the need to experience and sustain the ideology of a concept until they achieved its perverse negation and Duchamp’s concealment of the work of art in the face of an overpowering, unconscious era, in our virtual-potential present day, post-technological, bereft of history and orphan of strong signs towards any future, but in a popular and sociologic dimension aimed at the unisex consumption of the present as a necessary safety valve for letting off the steam of mankind’s power, the artist – though without collecting the many forms of experience made available to us by our historical matrices – now tries to reconstruct forms and visionary morphologies, a Theaterbühne, or theatre stage, where narratives and performances can once again be consumed. A theatre stage that is transformed into a Schaubühne, or show stage, where this Milanese artist reveals to us, her audience, the multimedia and multimodal forms of her carnet of travel images; cultural geographies and foreign situations that she brings to explosion and blossom in a sort of apology and sublimation of her wanderings, of travel and of diversity.
Chiara Dynys is presenting a series of light boxes and a video: works that need light and where light itself acquires even a political meaning.

SIPARIO / CURTAINS comprises essentially photographic works, which the artist processes by superimposing red curtains – the reference is obviously to theatrical curtains – indicating almost tautologically the paraphrase of life: human existence as a metaphor.
The curtains are sometimes completely open, sometimes half closed. Every now and then they only part a little. And images of the whole world transpire, stimulating and amplifying the observer’s memory, nostalgia and awareness.
Similarly, the video is an interminable sequence of photographs, a sort of slide show whose static views follow one another at intervals of a few seconds, tied together by a visual detail – nearly always the focal role played by humanity – which remains in the projected image, as Chiara Dynys never closes her curtains on the world completely.

The three-dimensional aspects that Chiara Dynys aims to restore to her work and to its meanings are found not so much in her use of a given means of production, as in her ability to reconfigure and liberate the space of a museum, giving it a new architectural identity. Which can also be institutional.

Mario Casanova, 2009 (translation Pete Kercher)

Ph. © Chiara Dynys.