Chiara
Diamantini
Biography
Chiara Diamantini was born in Senigallia in 1949. She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Urbino in 1972, Chiara Diamantini has since then linked her cultural journey to the artist’s book and to verbal-visual poetry. In her poetic-visual experiments he developed the “search for an aesthetic function” to arrive at “the interaction between word and image”, using creatively an often symbolic language. His artist books, his works are poetic itineraries, rich in content and elegance formal, which open within the quotations of the greatest exponents of literature. Texts, decoded, live with a new energy, are enriched with deeper meanings, which the artist reveals by establishing an indissoluble relationship between the word, the concept and the sign, a connection between language and image that goes beyond a simple illustration. Chiara Diamantini has held various personal and numerous group exhibitions in Italy and abroad, she has been present in the most important exhibition spaces, from the Venice and San Paolo Biennials to the Italian Cultural Institute in Tokyo, from the University Art Gallery in Sydney to Musée de la Ville in Paris, from the Palazzo delle Esposizioni and the XI Quadrennial in Rome to the MOMA in New York, from the Guggenheim Foundation in Venice to the Pecci Museum in Prato, from the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington to the Mart in Rovereto. His works appear in important public and private collections. As part of the “XVI National Visual Arts Award” he received the “Città di Gallarate” purchase award for Visual Poetry.
Critical text
“Chiara Diamantini extrapolates fragments of sentences from famous pages (Shakespeare, Leopardi, Nietzsche, Kafka, Eliot, Breton, and so on) and assembles them as verses of a rigorous visual order: the published word, removed by her from the original metrical context or narrative, takes on new values without ever using violence on the matrix text in its citationism (entrusted to graphic, chromatic, material, photographic interventions, to small transferables). It becomes shattered, but never tampered with. The precise order of the original development is also preserved in the fragments themselves.
Literature becomes, therefore, the deposit from which this meta-author draws her materials with which she builds not comments, not illustrations, not reversals of signs, but solely her own poetry. So, perhaps the expression that best suits her procedure can be found in the short title of her first personal exhibition in Oman a few years ago: The work on the work.“
_Mirella Bentivoglio
