A precise analysis of our sensations when faced with a work of art leads us to recognise that masterpieces act upon us in different ways, depending on our cultural legacy, our central nervous system, our degree of excitement and the aesthetic pleasure they manage to produce. Every preceived emotion can be linked to the joy that arises from the certainty of having achieved knowledge (the prerogative of whoever discovers a truth, or to whom it is revealed). Knowing is not limited to the known world, but belongs to the world of thought, has the value bof language for the spirit and can open the way to an intelligible world. Usually the general public stands before a work of art armed only with the criterion of taste, but the secret of art escapes inclination alone, and judgement comes nowhere close to its essential meaning.
The age-old question concerning the possibility or not of deciphering a contemporary work of art, and in what way, could become sovereign again when faced with the work of Dina Cangi. In order to understand her works one has to be in tune with her iconographic and mental components within that same value provided, more or less consciously, by the painter.
Cangi has a way of perceiving and feeling more than recounting, a will to listen within so as to identify the traces of the images that are already in her, where the colour may be symbolic, the compositional rhythm meaningful and where spaces and volumes perhaps have a value which is intrinsic to their silent sounds, to their suffocated screams, or in those sudden flashes of light.
For this painter from Arezzo the problem of light is a question of relationship, contrasts, stratification of material between light and dark where one comes to life, moves and expands precisely as a function of the other: a light which offers itself as a sort of "force of nature" that delineates a transfiguring interior landscape which stimulates the bypassing of the fact of the surface and offers us visions similar to those of a dream, a mirage, or a far-off, vague, dusty memory. On the one hand the flash opens up for us the infinite and definite space of the background, while on the other hand, in its developing within the volumes, it transposes us as if inside a geological fragment which induces us to geomancy.
In the world of Dina Cangi it is as if there were a taste for a new ruin that could signify a sort of conscience of the past in the full awareness of its overcoming. Tha path taken by this Tuscan painter is therefore one which is conscious of the tradition of a constant quest for freedom from conventional rules, sought for through a personal relationship with the history of mankind. In the end her militancy in the art of our contemporaneousness lies precisely in using artistic expression with the mind independent from the harassment of a systematic need for novelty, to the advantage of an attention to the needs of ones own inner life.
The episode of the sirens in Homer's Odyssey may better clear up this concept: Ulysses, the only person authorised to listen to the singing of the deadly song of those diabolically fascinating beings, is tied hand and foot to the main mast, while his companions fiercely row, faithful to preceding orders, so as to lead the vessel to safety between Scylla e Charybdis. Dina could be seen as a modern Ulysses, attracted by the absolute knowledge offered by the sirens (easy forms of ephemeral art requested by the market society), and is tempted to leave the hard and constant work of study in order to embrace less arduous means of expression. The posture of Ulysses held fast at the main mast could correspond to those parameters which Dina has imposed upon herself in order to create art: a predefined perimeter within which to move her interior forms. The well indoctrinated travelling companions could portray the blind faith of the past, her wanting to create a continuum between ancient art and contemporary art, where painting becomes a physiological need, as important as drinking or breathing.
We are often led to recognising what is already noticeable in us or what appear familiar to us (ignoring the Freudian concept according to which it is sufficient to give a name to a thing in order to make it exist). It is for this reason that, however, Dina could become the mirror of the remains of each of us, the reflection of our archaeological memory (another term which was dear to Freud in defining tha analysts excavation of the patient's mind).
Cangi's expressive project is certainly not aimed at fixing static images onto the surface of the picture, but rather at following the traces of those icons which, at the mental level, intertwine and shatter constantly in a pursuit which is never too quiet. This is a proposal for possible outcomes and probable needs inserted into the sam creative cycle, open and continually reformulated, which aims at delineating new perspectives of an interior path.
Every one of her paintings becomes in this way a place of ideal images, of hints and analogies inserted into a relational space. A memorial dimension released from every occasional referential or too rational qualification, and propelled towards a presumed lyrical-existensial naturalness. These are works which present themselves as a field of manifestation and retrieval of an archaeological imaginative urgency. Not an evoking fantasy, but an evocation of fantasising aimed at setting up a sort of phenomenology of the fairytale possibility within that allusive code that could correspond to the geological map of the artist's human self.