Dino Chatila's creations exist at the intersection of abstraction, minimalism and kineticism, defining a specificartist’s space in the contemporary art.
Chatila works in various techniques - painting, sculpture and installation. The main materials involved in the artist’s creations - wood, glass, metal textiles, as well as paper, acrylic and oil are objects of construction, deformation, transformation and research.
Dino Chatila’s creativity has a deep psychological basis and is directly related to the personal experiences of the author. Each work is truly "lived" by the artist, being an object, an interlocutor, a field of experiment and a diary of his feelings and emotions.
The process of creation of Chatila's objects balances on the verge of composing, adding layers and elements, transformation and destruction, bringing into collaboration two poles and two interdependent elements of any life process or cycle. Layers of pictorial matter appear one after another, overlapping each other and creating a field for subsequent mechanical action - scratching, detaching layers of paint, freeing fragments of the surface of the painting. Clearing and deforming multilayered pictorial space, the artist literally pushes the boundaries of the invisible, penetrating into the depths of the layers of painting, exposing the hidden basis of the canvas.
On the canvas or aluminum, he applies and then rips off and removes the colored matters, as if they were strips of a body he cuts into pieces to extract the primal essence, the surface hidden under the color. The word "color" comes from the latin celare, which means hiding, keeping secret. Hiding oneself under make-up, under a screen surface that would conceal the truth that the artist wants to bring to the light, to disclose. From the slow decomposition work, he creates a different image, as if he wanted to unmask the successive layers.
Dino Chatila’s work is akin to the movement with the flow of time and against it. Time is recorded in every layer and in every fragment created by the artist, and by cleaning the outer surface of the work, he returns back to the beginning, to the starting point.
Chatila's abstract compositions are visual "memory maps", spaces that bring together a multitude of feelings, memories and images imprinted through the artist's gesture and "encoded" on canvas, wood or aluminum panel.
But the hand-to-hand combat with the material does not stop there. In other works, Dino Chatila beats the metal or the plexiglas, hitting and white bleeding it, using tools that seem to be his own fists or his own claws, inflicting on the reflective material successive deformations that unveil the light and create moving, almost aquatic, intangible reflections on the surface.
Sometimes, his obsession and his persistence go so far as to pierce the surface, penetrating it to discover what is happening behind it and to find the essence of things and gestures behind the image or the objects: the catching chaos, organic and violent, primitive and primordial, born from the instinctive energy contained in every act of the enjoyment of the creation.
Anastasia Lwoff
Memory out of time | FR
There are events in one's life that become a starting point for catharsis or epiphany. This is how Dino Chatila explains tha paradigm of the work he is presenting here. He came up from a hard blow wanting to strike it back, blow after blow, considering the creative support as an enemy, to lay it bare it or lay it down.
On the canvas or aluminum, he applies and then rips off and removes the colored matters, as if they were strips of a body he cuts into pieces to extract the primal essence, the surface hidden under the color. The word "color" comes from the latin celare, which means hiding, keeping secret. Hiding oneself under make-up, under a screen surface that would conceal the truth that the artist wants to bring to the light, to disclose. From the slow decomposition work, he creates a different image, as if he wanted to unmask the successive layers.
But the hand-to-hand combat with the material does not stop there. In other works, Dino Chatila beats the metal or the plexiglas, hitting and white bleeding it, using tools that seem to be his own fists or his own claws, inflicting on the reflective material successive deformations that unveil the light and create moving, almost aquatic, intangible reflections on the surface.
Sometimes, his obsession and his persistence go so far as to pierce the surface, penetrating it to discover what is happening behind it and to find the essence of things and gestures behind the image or the objects: the catching chaos, organic and violent, primitive and primordial, born from the instinctive energy contained in every act of the enjoyment of the creation.
Maud Salembier
AICA - Belgian Association of Art Critics