As Plato wrote, “Beauty of style and harmony and grace depend on simplicity.” Surely, Dina Recanati has the uncanny ability to wed with grace her unconscious and conscious states. And with great simplicity, she conveys a mood that clearly evidences her vulnerability. In the selections on view of the Eighties, which occupy a special enclave in her development, she engages the viewers in a sensory communication with the incomprehensible.
She challenged herself by creating works in a variety of materials, sometimes fragments of materials and often reused materials that defy extinction. Whereas in this period many works are of metal, most are of wood, usually rigid and resistant to shaping. But Recanati is a fighter. She wet the wood and worked it until under her skilled hands it was shaped to her needs.
Striking wall works of disjunctive elements are neither paintings nor sculpture but rather object-art that call attention to new spatial relationships. Dina’s sculptures offer multiple implications. Some are slightly bent, reminding us of the passing of time. As if made of paper, the wood is twisted and torn as Dina’s life was torn from her own roots many times. One cannot escape the conclusion that books as objects, made of wood veneer, were natural subjects for Recanati. In ice blue tones, often with reds that heighten the chromatic effect, they have endured 25 years. With an unalloyed purity, books record for posterity lives lived, their memories, triumphs and vulnerabilities. Books engage a reader since one can be submerged in their fictions or facts, transcending life, releasing fantasies so essential since childhood, and in the reading we give our fantasies free reign. The daring of Recanati’s works cannot be minimized.