> FR
Dino Chatila
This is a visceral art, at once powerful and yet gentle. Expressive in its authentic power. A visual language revealing the struggles of a lifetime.
Dino Chatila is self-taught. His art resembles a natural outpouring, a need to divulge. His own life is rich with multiple, intersecting identities. He was born in Puerto Cabello in Venezuela in 1964. Of Lebanese descent and with a family history rooted in both Muslim and Catholic religious traditions, he has a passion for Italy, and now lives and works in Brussels.
Chatila’s aim is to show the hidden aspect of truth of all kinds. When we experience disillusionment in life, it reveals another side of things. Fissures appear in the world we used to believe in. What remains once our certainties and illusions have disappeared?
If the surface of things proves to be deceptive, if what shrouds things hides them, then one has to dig deeper, to seek out what is real. Layer-for-layer, the soul must be set free. When working his paintings in oil, Chatila scrapes, scratches and holes their surfaces... His practice is not without violence. Nor without delicacy either. The battle against all forms of pretence is a fierce one: the truth must be pierced to the quick. For much of the time, he also backtracks, reworks his paintings and mends them. This is not a peaceful quest, all the more so because memory is at stake.
The traces left by the artist’s gestural marks – line, surface working, colour, thread - speak to us subtly of his inner journey, a journey, he says, that assists him to see with greater clarity. What disappears thus fosters emergence.
Chatila is engaged in a physical struggle to reach the intimate. His large-format canvases require a physical commitment from him as he lays down the material, which he then modifies in a return to the surface, digging into it, scraping, lacerating, and then patching it up as one would a wounded body. Gesture is essential.
Make no mistake: Chatila’s is a truly sculptural language, which liberally expresses hidden aspects of the soul. His is not an approach rooted merely in the material.
Chatila applies his gestural marks to canvas and wood, as well as to Plexiglas and stainless steel. The latter material in particular exerts a fascination on its audience and reflects back to them hidden aspects of their own being...
Plexiglas and steel clearly are clearly suggestive of the relief as form. However, a pin is also an incursion into space. Chatila drives pins into his canvases, and they emerge to the rear. They pass through space; they invades it: indicative of the third dimension. Chatila’s pins, with or without their coloured glass heads, resemble a vibrating field that settles onto the canvas and takes up space. They embody an inherent allusion to sewing and mending; the infinite colour nuances of their glass heads scintillate, whilst their sharp ends hint at a threat of danger.
The art of Dino Chatila is at once impulsive and considered, bountiful and yet subtle. And beneath it lies life and truth.
Isabelle Grevisse