BENVENUTO GUERRA

Examining Dina Cangi's past and recent artistic production, we can trace a difficult course beginning from the innermost recesses of shadow to the wider and redeeming breath of light.
The artist from Arezzo, Tuscany had - until very recently - a very distinct, precious archaicizing style. We can define her works as open and carefully placed on the border between figurative and abstract art. From the depth of the "nocturnal" background and from the abstract base of the paintings, precious and suggestive traces of figures - veiled archaic and mysterious remnants of ancient civilizations - surface. Equally precious were the layers of diverse and well-researched materials and their contrast with shadow and light.
The artist's style was cryptic, open to many meanings and interpretations. It offered only a slight indication or clue, it was therefore essentially allusive, stimulating inner personal interpretations and favouring related projections.
The reference - as attested by the titles of her works - was almost constantly directed towards a deep, underground and submerged world and to its mysterious surfacings, still suspended between revelation and concealment. An underground world which shaded the psychic subconscious through its symbolism. However, through the "nocturnal" universe and the innermost recesses of shadow, the omen, the announcement, gradually reveal the penetration of light. In the intermediate phase - between her previous and her latest production - a new world has taken form, a world which is still contended and suspended between shadow and light, where the tension and the idea of proceeding towards a luminous "elsewhere" is increasingly evident.
Her latest production shows the beginning of the artist's cathartic rise, after having previously experienced the descent into the underworld.
Dina Cangi is not presently representing the underworld, but is now representing the "above", the cosmic breath of light, the air and the clouds hovering in the sky which in her paintings is real and at the same time mystic and fantastic.
Only those who have interiorized and cathartically overcome the dominion of shadow can reach this spiritual and revealing light. The artist's new production has introduced remarkable changes (not only in its contents) in fact, the stratification of material and the connotation of openness and of multiple meanings do not appear in her most recent production.
However, her unique colour-light sensitivity still appears, further refined and at the same time, although slightly modified, the allusive potential still remains. It is therefore easy to find in Dina Cangi's production the changes and the constant features, within the intensity of the meaning of her artistic and existential path and research. The artist from Arezzo now paints skies that are both naturalistic and fantastic and therefore (besides their simply referential aspect) they are allusive and open to the visionary "end": she now paints an extraordinary and concrete sky and at tha same time the "rest" adn what is "beyond" the sky.
Even her most recent works are slightly evocative, they encourage the processes and related projections. "All flows by ..." Eraclitus said, and maybe even painting corresponds (within the human anxiety towards the cosmic becoming) to the subconscious need to interrupt the flow of time, to idealistically stop the passing of time, even the slight time of the passing by of clouds.