Memory out of time
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