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Skinned Suona

Antonio Di Mino
Parts of the Body as Symbols
By Chiara Carfi

Manhattan recently presented to the public the work of Antonio Di Mino, a self-taught artist living in Palermo, Sicily, who paints parts of the body as symbols of his personal experience.

In the presentation to the exhibition we read: [Antonio's] Ô'works are tactile, stirring meditations on reductive form. Legs, the tongue, and hands are suspended. Di Mino's forms are objectified on a monochrome beige ground. Replete with textural surfaces, the body parts transform from human limbs to strips of organic matter. The fleshy limbs are existential protrusions that fill the canvas with a subtle reminder of our physical composition and fragile mortality. Di Mino's brushwork is fitting expressionism that lends a light mark - the mark of a surface taking form, to all his works. These expressionist marks build an interesting contrast to the more carefully modeled forms within the picture. His use of open space adds yet another psychological element to his work. Like Bacon, he uses areas of emptiness contrasted with areas of built up texture and dimension to create a world of startling bodily presentations.'' (2004, Agora Gallery press release).
Following his New York experience, Antonio will go back to Sicily to work on an interesting multimedia project in collaboration with Giovanni Sollima, a famous composer well known in the international music scene. Singer-composer Franco Battiato commissioned Sollima for a composition inspired to the atmospheres of Dante's Inferno. Ô'Hell'' will premier this August at the Festival di Fano and will include scenes created by Antonio di Mino, which will interact vividly with Sollima's music. Sounds, a sequence of images and lights, will concur to the contemporary recreation of the emotional reality described by Dante in his masterpiece.
"All my works focus on the research of the skin's fragments and on the materials under the skin," says Di Mino. "This developing in a study of specific parts of my body, my legs, my tongue... microscopic tissue that become a macroscopic landscape in which it is possible to work on the skin's movements and imperfections, as a continuous changeable self-portrait."

For more information go to antoniodiminoblogspot.com.