Galleria Fumagalli in Bergamo inaugurates Chiara Dynys’ fourth solo exhibition. On that occasion, the artist shows for the first time in Italy “Clean Your Eyes”, a project she has been working on in the last year, and which will be exhibited in 2012 throughout Europe. The series of images, monochromes and landscapes, appears in eye-catching and bulky “baroque” frames, made of plaster of the same basic colour as the framed image: white, blue, red and gold. The theme of fire, air, ice and desert which appears in the works through the symbology of colour, is implied in a basic and non-intellectual manner: they are the matrix of the flood of images to which we are daily subjected and the basis of the visible world.

Various interpretations of the four elements develop different linguistic paths, distinguish different cultures from their roots, narrate our history as well as prehistory. “Clean Your Eyes” is a project born from a sensation, a desire, an urgency to “clean” the vision of the world and to “reset” the mind: basic, elementary and immediate nature, which is depicted in these photographs, no longer exists, but the frame accomplishes a second purpose, that of removing it from our sight, isolating it and letting been considered and seen once more.

If the state of nature is utopian, the culture – that is the photograph, the frame, the symbol, the metaphor, the context – is the only way able to hold memory and nostalgia. As a continuation of this line of thought, “Passages” will be on view, a video made in 2010 using long planned-sequences to film the endless labyrinths of the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome: information, memory, nostalgia, culture as well as flattening and oblivion are the contradictions that the human beings experience when they seek an interpretation of the world beyond the mere biological survival.