| Thirty years have gone by since Arnaldo
Dini came to the attention of the critics and art lovers with his
vast, innovative fresco of the Resurrection, full of symbolic significance,
painted for the apse of the church of St. Evasio. Since then his
artistic progress has continued, according to a philosophy that
places man at the center, describing his existential adventure and
experiences with his surroundings, capturing the changes, the hesitations,
the expectation, the hopes of modern man with the sensitivity of
shared emotions and with a luminous stillness to which the words
of Khalil Gibran are particularly suited, when he says: “Beauty
is a murmur/a faint whisper/that speaks to our soul./Its voice surrenders
to our silence/like the dim light that trembles/for fear of the
shadows.” This great anthological exhibition, therefore, while documenting
the progress made by the artist in his development, also provides
a summing up of decades of striving, of luminous fertility. In his
fresco for St. Evasio, Dini already expressed a full artistic maturity,
which was also clear from his earlier exhibitions in which he demonstrated
the results of his extensive research into the most authentic expressions
of nature and man on our mountain - to which he has close ties,
having been born at Corniglio - on the strength of his excellent
instruction at the Paolo Toschi art institute where he was a pupil
of the most sensitive of masters, Nando Negri. And in the exhibition
at the Parma Gallery {June 1969), the critics stressed this tendency
of his to look toward “his simple background, nourished by pathetic
sadness and a fantastic vein in the attempt to create a painting
that had its source in local traditions. This is his interpretation,
in the sorrowful figures that seem to be taken from the tales of
the mountains, the dark forests of ancient legends, the menacing
atmosphere that falls over everything from the dark skies” (Gianni
Cavazzini in La Gazzetta di Parma). Full of curiosity and the desire
to learn, the following year, also at the Parma Gallery, he exhibited
a number of painted
stones, as Giovanni Pettenati wrote in Opinione Pubblica: “The
artist has not forgotten his usual themes: the serious expression
of a young girl, 'that way of breathing the same air that gives
substance to the friendship of groups, the flowers, the great tentacles
of the trees with their roots and branches. But the forms and tones,
along a secret pathway, have found new relationships and affinities,
leveling the previous leaps from the flame of a corolla to the subdued
complexion of a face. However the dialectics between full-voiced
song and subterranean sensuality remains open to rearrange the polyphony
of the different elements, and to testify to the youth of this painter,
from the great scene of Messina or the tangle of bodies, at the
entrance, where the solitude of ages goes up a note in loss and
tragedy, to the passages on stone, freely contoured by chance, another
demand of immediate spontaneity.” Arnaldo Dini once explained his
need to paint on blocks of stone to Carlo Drapkind: -“It is an act
of love toward my mountain. I was born in a small village in the
Apennines called Corniglio, and I have brought its stones away with
me, ideally, to express the hard work, the fatigue of the mountain
people, their strong personality and temperament.” The slabs were
also exhibited in Pontremoli and Viadana, so that the artist began
to be known and identified as “the stone painter”. “His works -
wrote La Gazzetta di Mantova - strike the critic and observer particularly
for the expressive force that they are able to transmit, for the
depth of a gaze, the poignant sweetness of a face. It is a peculiar
sensitivity of the soul that Dini is also able to express in his
religious paintings, which are a frequent theme in his works, where
he is able to impress this nobility of the spirit onto the stone
-that same stone that, for so many years, was the very environment
that nurtured his youthful inspiration.” The religious theme, heretofore expressed in a number of separate works, becomes a choral expression, a symphony, in the St. Evasio fresco where the Resurrection is represented with an innovative iconography that shows Christ perennially resurrected even in our own time. “This Christ - I wrote in La Chiesa di Sant'Evasio published in 1971 - who walks amid the anonymous skyscrapers of Via Jenner, is a man among us, with us. His tragedy is barely visible, marked only by two red spots on his wrists. More than his death, he wants to remind us of his rising. The grace that is found there, in that altar towards which he is walking, is an invitation to us to follow. Not as an alternative to pain and anguish, but with the disarming serenity of love, that charitas that is the oldest root of Christianity. The crowd follows him, full of faith, tranquil in the healing light. It is a heterogeneous crowd, but all are moved by a common denominator identifiable in the peace of the spirit. No one, however, is willing to give up his own personality, which Dini has highlighted with a well- defined sense of volume and a particular tint of the skin. The chromatism of the faces, indeed, take on an identifying function of the individual personalities. Here is Paul VI with his great persuasive gesture, inviting all to follow the Redeemer; here is the dear face of the good shepherd, John XXIII; the recently deceased archbishop Evasio Colli, who did so much for churches on the city outskirts, especially this one; the apostolic administrator Amilcare Pasini; the great apostles of peace John Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi; the daily workers of the spirit, the parish priests; and many bthers, anonymous for the mass, but not for their leader: men whose faces are lined by the years, young women with long hair, mothers, children with their toys. The artist photographed them in the neighborhood and put them in the painting, near the great Christ, risen for them; and he continues to walk along these broad, swift streets on the edge of the city with its glimpses of the distant countryside, viewed with hostility tinged with regret because it is just on these last strips of asphalt that many of those who repudiated the country have their homes. Off in the distance, in the background, an Apennine horizon. Dini could not forget it. He comes from there and perhaps it is this that made him paint on stone first, then on reinforced concrete.” In addition to the religious themes, Arnaldo Dini shows a deep interest in the problems that have beset society since the end of the Sixties and early Seventies when, as the country underwent its great industrial transformation, many people left the country with its ancient, deeply rooted human values and moved to the cities, with their history-Iess suburbs, squalid and anonymous. The fresco painted for St. Evasio led to orders for other frescoes, a type of art that few are still capable of painting. Thus, in the home of the entrepreneur Notari at Corniglio in 1972 he developed the theme of the mountain as the place to which men return to rediscover a simpler life and friendship. A message of hope that is restated in the canvases exhibited in 1974 in his gallery-studio at Via Oberdan. “Serenity and hope - I stressed on that occasion - are the components that imbue the works of Arnaldo Dini, a painter who deals with the themes that life puts before us every day with a restraint that derives from his acute, retiring sensitivity.” In the meantime he continues his fresco painting with “The Flower Children” (1973) painted in a home in Parma; “Summer on the Po” at Roccabianca ( 1975 ); “The Ascension” in the cemetery at Fidenza (1978); “The Evolution of Man. Episodes from the Space Age” (1979). At the beginning of the Eighties, the provincial office of the blood donors' association AVIS invited him to paint a symbolic work on the value of donation to be placed in the Sanctuary of the Madonna delle Spine at Sissa, chosen to be the patron saint of donors for the province. A difficult theme resolved brilliantly by the artist who divided a long canvas (2.20 x 1 m) into three parts: at the top is the venerated image of the Madonna delle Spine with the Infant in her arms, surrounded by heads of angels; at the center he placed three donors who generously extend their arms from which precious drops of blood fall into a vessel in the shape of a funnel, symbol of the immensity of he who gives and of he who receives the gift, while a clock symbolizes the perennial nature of the gift itself; in the bottom section a patient, lovingly attended by a woman, represents the concrete scope of the donation. The painting is one of the last works in which the artist expresses himself with a language bound to naturalistic figuration. The Seventies were difficult years in Italy from the social and political point of view, with the massacres by different ideological groups, and for art it was a time in which a strong current began to circulate against painting, in favor of other forms of expression such as poor art, conceptual art, minimalism and so on. Arnaldo Dini was deeply affected by these violent tensions that were agitating society, and his “characters” became assemblies of stones bound from within by iron. The man became harder, his emotions petrified, forced to travel in a world that is hostile to him and engages him in mortal combat, well represented in a painting from 1979 in which a horseman struggles with a foot solder in the extreme existential battle. |
A future of anguish and trepidation seems to await man who is
more and more “petrified
and paralyzed in his impotence to dominate these lethal destructive
processes he himself has set in motion. He risks losing all that
which enables him to see, understand, feel and act; he risks finding
himself alone in a desolate scenario of aridity amid the sinister
outlines of menacing buildings. Nature becomes desolate and arid
when it loses its vitality and the beauty of growing plants: the
leafless branches twist and poke, the landscape with its dark
colors has the shades of premonition. And Dini captures the central
essence, while new creatures, solidified in a compact density,
loom in the foreground with powerful force. But within them there
is still - and here is the first, feeble sigh of hope - a unifying
element: a strong steel wire that ramifies in the limbs and sustains
the entire bodily framework. In subsequent paintings, the rough
mass is transformed into neatly squared blocks that highlight
even more the interior bond that becomes more vitally determinIng.
And when, in the darkest moments, the filaments break and let
the inert blocks fall, the iron stubs, stripped bare, vibrate
and contort in a last spasm under skies lined by unreal flashes.
It is hope that prevails in Dini, however, under the form of anew
life, that is presented purified of all previous residues. This
vital
thread “of life” floating free in space, announcing anew dawn,
winding and twisting to become a shape again, a figure, a living
being, a man:
once again the protagonist in a completely transformed world.” Pier Paolo Mendogni |
STUDIO D'ARTE DINI - Via Repubblica, 38 - 43100 PARMA
TEL. 0521 285936 - 0521 645545
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