Private Atlas, Chiara Dynys – Capitolo III – 10/12

Chapter III – Viaggio in Italia
September 2025 – January 2026

Texts by Alessandro Castiglioni

This third chapter of the exhibition Private Atlas, with its four installations for BUILDING BOX, highlights an ideal conversation between the artist, the history of art and the personal histories that punctuate it, in a series of unexpected and seminal interweavings and overlaps. The past for the artist is, in fact, living matter that is often shaped into a futurability in which eternal return is but one of the possible options. Thus we find surprising encounters between possible pasts and presents yet to be explored: images and references to classicism dialogue with metallic surfaces, baroque references with experimental plastic materials.
But Viaggio in Italia is also a journey inward, between the folds of the biography of Chiara Dynys and of each viewer, as in Roberto Rossellini’s masterpiece, in which the imagery of the vernacular tradition, of art history coexist with references to poetry, to the use of words and rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy.
One could, finally, succinctly note how the last four works of Private Atlas address as many historical and theoretical issues, all of which are significant within Dynys’ practice: Canova and classicism for the first work; the word, the book, and more generally the relationship between language and image in the second and third appointment; the Baroque and popular culture in the large installation that closes the entire project: a memento mori even if, after all, “è del poeta il fin la meraviglia” (“it is of the poet the fin the wonder”).

Chapter III- 10/12

With the title La Blancheur, Chiara Dynys identifies a series of works that are part of a research path dedicated to the dialogue between present and past, where the relationship with the ancient is the protagonist and of which the most relevant is the large permanent installation created for the Reggia di Monza in 2022.
The installation conceived specifically for Private Atlas takes the form of five small architectural structures, scattered throughout the exhibition space in continuity with Dynys’s characteristic approach to environmental research. Photographs taken by the artist herself in various institutions that house works by Antonio Canova—from the Pinacoteca di Brera to the Museo Correr and the Magnani Rocca Foundation—capture details that, through spatial multiplication created by mirrored surfaces, form a kind of small “Canovian time capsule”. Immersed in white, each micro-architecture becomes a journey through time in search of beauty and ideal perfection.

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Private Atlas is a solo exhibition that unfolds over time, an experimental project tracing thirty-five years of the artist’s research and activity. The exhibition represents a journey composed by a series of appointments that reveal and highlight poetic aspects of the artist’s work, delving into her biography, her obsessions and her artistic exploration.

As curator Alessandro Castiglioni observes, the exhibition is presented as: “an historical, but also emotional geography of Chiara Dynys’ work.”

The exhibition project, conceived as a private atlas, is structured around three main chapters entitled La Disseminazione della memoria [The Dissemination of Memory], Attraversamenti [Crossings] and Viaggio in Italia [Journey Through Italy], presenting, on a monthly basis, historical works and new productions by the artist in site-specific installations designed on purpose for BUILDING BOX’s space.

The first chapter, La Disseminazione delle memoria [The Dissemination of Memory] (from January to April, 2025), gathers works where space, atomized and fragmented, reflects on the relationship with forms of Western culture in constant dialogue with one’s identity.

The second chapter, Attraversamenti [Crossings] (from May to August, 2025), addresses one of the central themes in the artist’s work: the threshold, conceived as a place, a limit, in both its material and immaterial dimensions.

The third chapter, Viaggio in Italia [Journey Through Italy] (from September, 2025 to January, 2026), referencing Rossellini’s iconic masterpiece, explores cinematic imagery, the relationship with the ancient and classical, as well as with popular and vernacular culture.

These narratives, like a kaleidoscope—another archetypal form dear to the artist—intertwine, juxtaposing images and imaginaries in a circular continuity over the course of a year. This approach offers a new historical-critical perspective on Chiara Dynys’ work, as suggested by Castiglioni.