Michela Dieni

Untitled

(series of works: 2 works)

1973

Gouache on paper

24 x 33 cm (per work)

Framed

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"I died

When I was a child

I died

With a hundred others

Through the chimney

Went…"

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Michela Dieni paints as she writes in her poems: in statements. She doesn't explain, she doesn't tell, she doesn't describe. She confronts with unambiguous, clear and sharply contoured forms. They are structures from her imagination, which she stretches across the surface as simple compositions, formulated harshly and brittlely, without light modulation, without spatial staggering, at most with a few lines in the inner drawing. In strong chiaroscuro and complementary contrasts, her fantastic figures fill the picture area massively and powerfully. Are they living beings? Organic structures, body parts?

Or is it fetuses? For despite their power, their beings seem strangely lost, unstable, and vacillating, and one begins to suspect that a story is being told here, her personal one, about loneliness, struggle, and femininity. Through the personal one hears the universal. She tells it in simple sentences that are at the same time profound, ambiguous, and complex, sentences worth saying and hearing.

 

"… Many people

And only one

Great silence..."

 

From the poem Reincarnation