Private Atlas, Chiara Dynys – Chapter III – 9/12

Chapter III – Viaggio in Italia
September 2025 – January 2026
BUILDING BOX

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- 9/12

In the late 90s Chiara Dynys began to include the word within her own works, initiating a work that places her poetics in continuity with multiple conceptual researches and that uninterruptedly she has been pursuing for more than twenty-five years. On several occasions this reflection on the word analyzes the communication systems of our society, such as the relationship between hypervisibility and the actual ability to communicate a message.
Versus (2024), the first work of Viaggio in Italia, from September 4th to Septermber 30th, 2025, adopts the dazzling electric colors typical of a brightly lit metropolis and employs irony and playfulness, as well as references to antiquity through the use of Latin, to deliver contradictory messages. These contradictions, by canceling each other out, confirm Marshall McLuhan’s theories: the medium is the message.