on the balcony, where she often played with her brother, she writes, “There, sometimes, a ‘milan’ [a bird of prey, a kite, endemic to Egypt] would dive into my snack, snatching it away from me, without so much as touching me. These birds resembled large crows and would often circle where there was food.” The bird of prey, mentioned by Recanati, reminded me of Sigmund Freud’s famous mistranslation in his essay “Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of Childhood,” which gave rise to major controversies in both psychoanalysis and art theory. Notwithstanding the controversies and the very different circumstances, it would seem that in both cases these childhood memories have played a profound symbolic role. Leonardo’s memory goes as follows: “[…] while I was in my cradle a vulture came down to me, and opened my mouth with its tail, and struck me many times with its tail inside my lips.”** Without dwelling on the meaning of Leonardo’s dream, it is interesting to note that being an illegitimate child, who never knew his father, he was raised by his young single mother. As for Dina, the memory of the “milan” can be interpreted as symbolizing the successive deprivations she experienced as a result of her father’s early demise. The account of birds circling over her food represents of course a real occurrence, but the fact that its memory has lingered such a long time may imply the symbolic significance of a perceived threat to her subsistence, or to the very basis of her existence. This feeling of existential fragility is subsequently reaffirmed by her account. “On the balcony wall, my brother […] carved an unsuccessful bull’s-eye, which he turned into a mask to cover the holes.” Thus, unable to create a bull’s-eye – missing his target – the brother transformed it into a mask behind which he could hide. In other words, the brother did not really succeed in filling their father’s shoes, and the mask/brother came to epitomize the absent paternal presence. 

However, Recanati goes on to write: “I began to perceive him as the responsible and wise older brother on whom one could count.” She was to re-find the support she craved years later, in her husband Raphael, a support which would allow her to create works replete with doubts but also with many certainties.

But before proceeding with the analysis of the impact her father’s death has had on her work, let us review some positive experiences from her childhood and early adolescence in Egypt, which were to resurface in her later works. First and foremost is the Nile and its ships, which “attracted me like a magnet. Gliding on the river were the Fellucas with their huge sails, those same boats used since ancient Egypt were still sailing, the river. Four thousand years had not altered their lines or their grace.” The memory of these sails is discernible inher later works in the loose canvases freely floating in space, blown this time by the breath of artistic creation. But the major experience was that of the encounter with the pyramids: “One felt in total communion with these gigantic structures, emerging from the sand, […] It was a magical moment. History was all around. A little further out was the Sphinx in all its majesty and splendor […] At the time, I had not realized the power of the impact, and the influence this experience would have on me.” The memory of these repeated visits to the pyramids was to be echoed later on in Dina Recanati’s architectural sculpture of “portals” and “columns.” Confronted since early childhood with the monuments of this grandiose and mysterious civilization, she learned an unforgettable lesson: Beyond the visible and beyond the reality of this world, lie invisible powers and it is these powers that instill soul in matter and in the various structures of the real. Ever since, Recanati looks in inanimate matter for that invisible source that fills it with spiritual meaning. When in Egypt, Recanati was never exposed to the West and to modern art; such an encounter was only to take place after she left Egypt, in 1946, for Great Britain, and two years later for New York, which was to become her home. Having studied art in London and New York, she started to exhibit her works in the mid-1960s.

Let us look briefly at her over 50-year long journey of creation, during which she has strove rigorously to satiate her persistent need to find her inner truth. She aptly describes the contradictions and the pain, but also the hopes that accompanied her along this journey, with all its inherent ups and downs: “I deal with the human condition, with laboriousness and despair – with dreams fulfilled and with dreams shattered – with joy and with pain – with marks and with burns – with passive acceptance and with memory – with man’s capacity

for rebuilding – his relentless struggle for survival – his built-in need for continuity.”

Her present oeuvre, a sort of three-dimensional chart of all these past experiences, is freed from worldly demands and wholly dedicated to spirituality in quest for an invisible infinity. Thus, in order to best understand the essence of her current work, it would seem worthwhile to trace the different stages leading up to it.

The Human Body

It was in 1960 that Dina Recanati, having chosen to study at the Art Students League in New York, made her first sculptures. Hewn out of alabaster, the head and shut eyes of her Leora (1960) displayed such mastery and sensitivity as to earn her the National Arts Club award in 1961. Another sculpture of hers from the same year, Head of a Woman was made of marble, drawing its inspiration from Constantin Branscusi’s Sleeping Muse (1909-10).

Recanati’s interest in the human body and its verticality is expressed in Standing Woman (1964), which also marks her transition to modeling and bronze casts, while the movement of the figure’s two arms toward the head is reminiscent of Amadeo Modigliani’s Caryatids (1910-14). In Woman with Lyre (1964), the spatial dimension and expressive tension evince a turning point in her work, whereas the musical theme calls to mind Jacques Lipchitz’s sculpture Song of the Vowels (1931). Her preparatory sketches show a vigorous line that already foretells her interest in painting.

Her bronze cast Three Hands (1965) is her first confrontation with space and the environment. Her bronze casts Gray Woman (1966) and Face (1968) divulge an increasingly freer plastic language, closer to abstraction, indicating an interest in the dramatic expressiveness of matter. The bronze components, encased inside each other, have lent the works an existential dimension which was soon to reappear in her work. The years dedicated to the human body allowed her to define her path. Having relinquished any reference to the human body, the message of Alef (1968) and Crown II (1969) becomes autonomous expressing the transcendency and spirituality embedded in the matter.

Archisculpture

As a sculptor, Dina Recanati began very soon to work on space endowing it with meaning through architectural structures. In 1968, she created her green-patinated bronze, Opening.

This work features a vertical panel resting on the ground, juxtaposed with a half-open door inviting one to peep through it. The upper part of the panel is crossed diagonally by a serrated blade-like triangle. The mysterious simplicity of this gate or opening is laden with symbolic meanings and brings to mind entrance to an archaic temple.

In 1972, Recanati created the bronze ensemble Jerusalem Crown, her first series of “archisculptures.” Opening was still a frontal work, whereas Jerusalem Crown is made of a group of five free-standing columns around and between which the viewer can freely move.

Recanati truly takes possession of space in this work, and by doing so she joins in with one of art’s major preoccupations in the 1970s. There is a striking contrast between the sight of these columns, which seem to be falling apart, and the work’s title, Jerusalem Crown. These columns are reminiscent of time-worn ruins, invoking a partly collapsed ancient temple.

Carrying with her the memory of the Egyptian monuments she visited in her youth and remembering their ruins that witnessed the greatness of a bygone past, Recanati analyzes with precision her own motives. “I deal with memories of the past of antiquities,” she writes and immediately adds, “I do not want to show destruction, yet we constantly confront it”; and to avoid any misunderstanding, she concludes: “I do not deal with disappearance but with continuity.” However, not fully satisfied with this statement, she explains that her deep attraction to ruins is anything but romantic: “I see ruins as some vestige of past achievements that had to end to allow new beginnings.” Thus, Recanati envisions the cycleof life and death which she so painfully experienced in her early childhood, discovering that the past does not necessarily mean oblivion and that it is only by cultivating its memory that one can build one’s own identity. Revisiting her twofold loss – her father’s death and the forgetfulness that shrouded his disappearance – she shares with us her deep conviction about what should be done in order to deal with such a tragedy: “To channel all your energies in creativity, to fight loss with creativity, death with life.” Nevertheless although there is something reassuring about the presence of vestiges of the past, which manifest a certain continuity of human existence, they also reveal the fragility of existence and its ephemeral character. This existential uncertainty is deeply inscribed in her work.

Returning to the idea of Opening, Recanati elaborates the notion of passage in her sculpture Together (1973): Two juxtaposed but independent vertical elements combined with two horizontal elements, which together produce a passage. Continuing in the same vein, she creates Gate (1975), a sculpture that clearly defines a passage, made of two vertical elements topped with two horizontal elements. These works express the strength of a vision but also the fragility of matter, a wish for stability but also the marks of time. This contradictory dialectic endows these sculptures with a tragic aspect but also with hope; or in Recanati’s own words: “I never meant to remove the hope from my work.”

After a period in which she attempts to represent this fragility in solid bronze, the artist realizes that she has to present it using fibers of an inherently fragile and ephemeral material.

This is how she came to choose, as her sculpting material, thin sheets of veneer which she would layer on top of each other, role like paper, or stain and tint. The sheer thinness of these veneer sheets conveys their brittle fragility but also makes them resilient and bouncy.

By layering a large number of sheets, Recanati creates a formally loose volume, implying, as it were, that one can peel it and penetrate the core of this transient reality. Using this material would allow her to develop a new formal language compatible with her search for a pictorial reality that would unify the continuity of visual memory with the ephemerality of material existence. Henceforward, all of Recanati’s work is based on a strenuous and contradictory balance between construction and destruction, showing and concealment, memory and oblivion, life and death. The architectural structures she has conceived belong to a dynamic of continuity and survival, whereas her veneer sheets are a clear expression of the ephemeral and transitory.

Recanati notes in this context: “My work in the wood veneer is like sand work, earth work, they got blown by the wind and washed of by the rains.” When she wrote these words, Land Art was attributing, in the U.S., the existence of a work of art to its documented memory rather than to its material durability. Knowing that ultimately endurance is contingent on the strength a work’s spiritual message, Recanati does not look for “time-resistant” materials. Wooden “portals” and “columns” would leave their mark on the 1980s; they were to produce an acknowledgement of an original work made by an artist whose persona had been forged through dealing with and overcoming pain and sorrow experienced in her youth. Very soon Recanati feels a need to charge this vertical universe of simultaneous memory and oblivion with an additional internal dialectic. This dialectic would hinge on color symbolism, and particularly that of the red, the black, and the white. In her memoirs, she mentions the associations that each of these colors has arisen in her: “Red: life, blood, passion, pulse; Black: dark forces, unknown night; White: innocence, purity, belief.” In a work such as The Three Pillars (1983), each pillar has its own color and the work’s complex message is deciphered through the interaction and the harmonious balancing of their respective symbolic meanings. The contradictory forces brought into play by Recanati are engaged in a stalemate struggle that informs the character of the pillars, whose lower part expands like roots of a tree and their tops branch out suggesting a future flowering. We suddenly realize that, no longer representing ruins, these columns have metamorphosed into vivacious living creatures – visual metaphors of life’s hardships. In face of their unassuming mysterious beauty, we must not forget that they stem from a deep inner need, which Recanati explains as follows: “I was always in search of something strong to build upon – until I realized that those columns had to be in me.”

The column thus becomes the reconstructed memory of a loss, a symbolic representation of the paternal support she lacked; its roots are deeply grounded in the soil of oblivion and its trunk soars upwards into an infinite space full of promise. This may be the reason why the artist has called one of them Prayer (1984). Having appeared in Recanati’s work, the column was to transcend its particular personal meaning and assume a universal message.

Thus, she explains the title of a work such as Elevation (1985), which is composed of two columns: “The name suggests reaching out, rising in the course of civilization, marching on, in the process of time and progress – elevating.” Recanati’s personal loss and pain are the primary spark that ignited her work, which was then rekindled by her encounter with the monumental vestiges of ancient Egypt. Sublimating these experiences, she succeeded in developing visions relating to the future of Man and society in general.

Throughout the years, Recanati created a number of works designed for public spaces. For these works, she has replaced wood veneer with painted sheets of aluminum. This modification, however, did not alter the nature of her work, which maintained its characteristic fragile and ephemeral nature. Manuscripts (1983) dialogues with the architecture of Beit Ariella – Tel Aviv’s central public library – and what it represents. It is made of four 260 cm high vertical elements aligned along the library’s building, which she describes as follows: “Sort of columns, trees and reaching tall, worked in layers […] The theme is to suggest layers of manuscripts.” The column, the tree and the manuscript are joined here to express the idea of spatial as well as spiritual growth, or elevation. “Beit Ariella suggests hope, learning. Layers on strong cores are roots,” affirms Recanati in her dialogue with the site. The columns/trees/manuscripts are painted red and black disregarding any patterned order: two are painted red, one – black and yet another one – red, giving the entire work a musical rhythm. The colors and shapes are visually contrasted with the architecture but at the same time reflect the library’s dynamic contents.

A few years later, Recanati was commissioned to create another outdoor sculptural group, this time for a sculpture park, Trees (1989). The group consists of three columns made of layered sheets of aluminum respectively painted in red, white, and black. They dialogue with nature, seem to be stemming from the earth and extend upwards, with their tops branching out like a tree. Their height is impressive and as the artist notes, they “have a life of their own, and as a group [they] act to define an environment or a wood. A presence that invites to reflect, to evoke.” In this piece, life’s fragility is contrasted with the powerful vitality and optimism emanating from these trees.

In 1992, Dina Recanati was commissioned to create her monumental work Three Arches for the Ben Gurion airport. This sculpture was later reinstalled in a special square set up on the road to the airport. I was involved in this delicate undertaking, which reminded me of another project, the installation of a large stabile by Alexander Calder, I had initiated in Jerusalem. These works’ monumental simplicity, their use of metal and color, and the type of setup chosen for them mark their respective surroundings with an imposing presence in distinct styles.

In Three Arches, instead of aligned columns, we have a platform with arches. Recanati returns here to the theme of her “gates,” but without their previous weightiness and drama. Stretching out into space, the arches seem lightweight; the black and the red arches are cut out in thick rectangular metal plaques whereas the white arch is made of vaulted metal. These three arches receive the travelers on their way to the airport, signifying a passage from our attachment to the ground to our soaring into the air. As we shall see in the next chapter, Recanati has often dealt with the so-called notion of “site specific.” But in the meantime, let us return to her use of wood veneer, and to her interpretation of the idea of the tree and its numerous meanings.

Working with wood took Recanati in new directions. She could no longer ignore the fact that her wooden columns were a sort of modern versions of a tree, that natural column loaded from time immemorial with multiple symbolic meanings. Considering her practice, she describes it as follows: “To me [… it] is a sort of backward progression in the chronicles of the tree. As if the sculpture drains from the strength of the unraveling tree trunk. In a way, the tree starts in the forest, it is cut, made into veneer and returns to be a tree in sculpture.” Extensively working in and with space, and intimately acquainting herself with wood and its textures, it was only natural for the idea of a forest to present itself to her. In 1988, she creates Forest, a monumental environment made of wood and wood veneer.This time she leaves the wood in its original color and texture and creates several vertical groups between which narrow passageways allow just enough space for movement. The effect is gripping; it is a world of silence that offers itself to us, a primordial and appeasing space in its humble yet proud unity. Analyzing the concept of forest, the artist notes that, first and foremost, the “forest is defined in terms of space, use, partial enclosure, size, idea of mobility, arrival, departures, inner and outer and in-between.” In the “Pillars” series, the columns create a point in space around which the viewer can walk. In Forest, on the other hand, we are presented with a maze-like universe, a different world that closes on us as we enter it seeking an inner truth, maybe even a revelation. Recanati writes: “The ‘Forest’ for me is a place where we sit and ponder and listen to our own inner voice, an oasis perhaps where we, the travelers, catch our breath on our continuous voyage.” For her, the forest is therefore a place for introspection. But more than that, as she said in the 1980s: “I believe I build in the wood environment my own sanctuary. A place for my survival.” From one work to the next, tirelessly, she is preoccupied with survival and, for her, “every creation is an act of faith in one’s self.” This belief is common to all artists, but in the case of Dina Recanati, it is deeply rooted in her soul; for her, it is like oxygen without which no life is possible.

Albeit, as a phenomenon, Recanati’s archisculpture is material and spatial, its objective is essentially spiritual. Moreover, despite its roots in basically early private experiences, it conveys a universal message encoded in a uniquely resonating contemporary art language.

Guardians of Memory 

While still working on her archisculptures, Dina Recanati also discovered the compactmystery of the book. Consequently, she went on to create several works dedicated to this object whose aligned signs preserve man’s thoughts and actions, dreams and visions. At first, she worked with a real book – with the object itself – and then she re-created it in bronze or in Styrofoam. Finally, she made it of sheets of raw veneer, a brittle and frailmaterial softened by humidity and saturated with hues that permeate its woodgrain. For Recanati, these compactly layered sheets of veneer form a physical carrier of messages that were erased by time and sunken in oblivion. She returns to the idea of visual archives withall their lost spiritual treasures doomed to painful and continuous silence and buried inthe sands of the past. To create her own vision of a book and recover forgotten primordial treasures, Recanatilaunches on archaeological excavations into the deeper strata of man’s collective unconscious. Intent on deciphering these invisible messages, she realizes that the greatest mystery of all is the very existence of the book itself. This memory-transmitting object, the first artificial brain, the extracorporeal organ comes to our aid when our memory fails us and preserves past memories for posterity. The book is the guarantor of our continuity and the source of our identity.

Recanati saturates the pages of her books with personal sensitivity tinted with earthy and celestial colors. The books’ half-opened pages are filled with expressively colored messages exuding pain as well as an unstoppable urgency. These color ideograms animate the foliated structure of these books, transformed in the heat of creation into painted objects. Books, in general, do speak, but their spiritual messages do not require words; indeed, they are inscribed in the very flesh of their pages and it is this unison of matter and spirit that enables us to perceive their profound significance. The pages carrying these messages were damaged by the tribulations of time and they were often burnt and destroyed by people fearing their unequivocal humanistic messages. To compensate for all these losses, Recanati reinvents a personal memory in which pain and hope coexist. She invites us not only to look at her works but also to touch and feel them. This multifaceted reading of her work is not easy. To decipher its secret, the trail of colors is to guide each and every one of us like an Ariadne’s thread leading to the depth of the labyrinth wherein the Minotaur dwells. Each new work of Recanati’s sends us back to our own inner experience, like a mirror reflecting our image and forcing us to self-examination. This inward movement is a precondition for a fertile dialogue with these enigmatic works, whose silent expressiveness relates to and touches us.

The idea of a book as vertical, isolated object gradually expands to include the notion of multiple books laid on the ground. In Stories (2000), a stack of grossly oversized books lay on the ground with their stained pages opened, suggesting abandonment and destruction.

Although muted, these storytelling books bear witness to existential fragility, holding secret message of a hope for renewal. The same idea of amassed books will reappear years later in Recanati’s Fingerprints (2013-16), in which a large number of closed books are stacked on a table. Each of the books in Stories II (2015-17) has a particular message: Each of them recounts, visually, the artist’s creative intensity of an intimacy filled with pain and hope. Brought together and stacked side by side, these books create a broad, powerful collective presence expressed through matter that has metamorphosed into a spiritual message. The book represents a major axis in Recanati’s work since the 1970s. It is only natural, therefore, that the artist was to give it monumental proportions, for example in Book (1989) or Dvarim (1996). The latter work, a set of standing books, slightly opened, whose different colors express their various messages, is displayed on the square in front of the Jerusalem International Convention Center. Integrated into an open urban space, they are engaged in a constant dialogue with this meeting place where people gather to exchange thoughts and views.

The idea of the book is further developed by Dina Recanati with her Diaries from the end of the 1980s. Here rolls of wooden sheets are tied together with ropes and assembled vertically, reminding the viewer of ancient manuscripts long lost and forgotten. Already in the “Manuscript” and “Parchment” series, created earlier in that decade, raw or painted unbound wooden sheets, amassed on top of each other, evoked memories of more ancient manuscripts such as the early Christian papyri discovered in the Egyptian Nag Hammadi library near Aswan in 1942, or the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the Qumran caves in 1947.

In the 1989 Diaries, the idea of abandonment and oblivion is enhanced by a hidden, closed down and inaccessible mystery, forever sealed in these elongated scrolls.

In this context we might recall Chohreh Feyzdjou (1955-1996), a Jewish Iranian female artist who died in Paris and who was, like Dina Recanati, torn between the Muslim, the Jewish and the Western heritages. Feyzdjou wrote: “[…] It is true that I remain Jewish and Iranian, no matter whether I live over here or back there […] I think of my work as belonging to the imaginary and utopian universe of man born into the world […].” Almost like an echo, Dina Recanati writes: “Egypt had been good to me, I loved the Egyptians […] Although not an Arab Egyptian, I had felt at home.” And in another passage, she states: “I feel like a Jew. I go through inner pogroms and emerge alive and more committed than ever as a human being.” Recanati did not know the work of Feyzdjou, although this artist’s works and her own Diaries were created in the same period. However, I think that she may identify with her Iranian colleague, who wrote: “This is how it feels: a wish to lose everything and to convince yourself that nothing is lost. That there are possible recoveries of the void. To shape things with remains and debris, to damage in order to resuscitate, to lose in order to save […] to risk and to gamble.” We have to bear in mind these words when we discuss Recanati’s current work to better understand the deep motivations that forge the great affinity between these two artists, beyond the originality of their works. In her Products of Chohreh Feydzjou (1988-92) – a tragic work, whose density is almost suffocating – the artist presents, among other things, black stained cases, boxes and bottles containing various objects. All these items seem like the remains of some nameless catastrophe; and in the middle of that woeful universe, stand numerous rolled, inaccessible paintings by the artist. These blackened rolls enclose images rending them invisible; their existence is that of a reality, memorized and documented.

For Dina Recanati, books, scrolls and rolls are objects into which we can enter mentally, step by step, layer by layer, or in a circular way. They invite the viewer to dream; these are objects whose invisible density can be imagined and whose content needs not be seen for its existence to be known. The essential thing is to know that within them lies the well of our collective memory, the source of our identity, the precious mines whose treasures nurture our imaginary, and that together they are like an ocean licking up the shores of the continent of humanity.

As a transmitter of verbal and other messages, the book has fascinated many contemporary artists, by offering them an alternative to the image that has undergone crises and transformation. For Recanati, the series of books, scrolls and rolls was a necessary complement to the series of columns and arches, the former serving as a link between men, the latter being a link between the earth and the sky. On the intersection of these horizontal and vertical paths stands Man, ready to own his past as well as to pave a road to the future.

Recanati’s art represents an act of continuity, an effort to organize existential chaos, an act of survival, and perpetual starting over. Having explored all forms of books, scrolls and rolls, having bound, tied, enrolled, painted and tinted them, created and re-created them in Styrofoam, bronze, aluminum, and wood in the form of compact objects, or objects blown up to architectural proportions, she sets off on a new path. However, she remains true to her premise that an object harboring an invisible mystery is more concrete and powerful than any image that only displays its surface.

Atemporal Fragility

Pursuing this idea of an invisible mystery enclosed inside an object, Recanati takes the tent, a temporary and fragile refuge, and re-structures it with thin, flexible sheets of veneer in a sculpture from 1989. She creates a vertical shape with an entrance leading to a dark space. 

Following this experiment, she decides to further explore this idea by using a different material – painted canvas. For Regal Abode (1992-95), she creates a tall structure, from the top of which stripes of canvas painted in different dramatic, dark colors are hanging down.

An insinuated inner space remains invisible. In No Entry – No Exit (1992-95), the title itself already suggests that the mystery on the inside remains immersed in the darkness of the invisible. The low, rounded structure is covered with layers of canvas protecting its mystery.

Promise (1995) has a vaguely hexagonal structure; mounted on a wall, the work allows us to see the sealed top of this body, possibly indicating a proximity to the “Firmament” series of paintings (1994 ,1992).

Slightly later, Recanati creates a monumental installation, Passage (2000), showing 14 figures that seem to have frozen in their peregrinations towards an unknown future. These 14 vertical presences of different heights are covered with loose sheets of dark canvas falling down from their tops. There’s nothing to suggest a human presence, but notwithstanding their mysteriousness, they leave no doubt as to their humanity. They are like shadows in the night, invisible but very present. This work and the “Tents” series stem from Recanati’s childhood memories; they convey the mystery of the desert’s timelessness, silence, transience, uncertainty, and existential fragility that touches upon the deepest fibers of our being.

In August 2001, when her Passage exhibition was opened at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Recanati noted: “Perhaps I was trying to convey the longing, to record something very precious and fragile that is about to vanish, a moving anonymous image. The incomparable Proustian flavor or Egypt’s life along the Nile has been engraved in the minds of those who lived it. They kept intact their childhood memories, reliving over and over those moments lost forever.”

From then on, Recanati would continue her quest towards the invisible and the memories of an increasingly blurred past by wrapping in canvas various everyday items in order to hide, conceal and transform them into carefully tied bundles. These works were given concrete names such as Bundles, Diaries, or Archives. The bundles are always round or rectangular in shape, made of canvas tinted or painted in a mix of ochers, blues and a rich spectrum of grays. Looking weary and dusty, these bundles are evocative of endless tribulations, and make one think of men and women around the world who bundle up their belongings before setting out to seek their destiny elsewhere. Here, too, the very notion of the bundle itself is reflected upon. The bundle is a visual metaphor of modern man, reduced once again to roaming our planet, an exile leaving his homeland, a refugee fleeing a conflict or a natural disaster. It is the symbol par excellence of the displaced, who lost his home and carries on his back a few articles gathered in haste to assure his survival. It reflects worry, insecurity, temporariness, instability; it is what’s left of a home that is definitively lost, a mobile object with varying contents to which one desperately clings. The amorphous bundle with the remainders of one’s existence is the last haven of the displaced, the last hope of the homeless, before the shroud of death covers one’s body. Each bundle reveals the secret of uprooted life thrown onto an unknown road.

By joining together her individual bundles, Recanati also creates Diaries (1999-2000), a work testifying to man’s existential fragility in general. This work is made of two groups of bundles, one forming a small mound on the ground, as if those carrying them have stopped to rest during their peregrination, and another overhanging the first group, suggesting a threat that could strike any moment, like dark clouds portending some imminent calamity.

In this work, she has masterly summed up the tragic aspect of the human condition using the simplest of means to express her great compassion for the other.

Elaborating on the concept of the bundle, Recanati also creates Archives (1999), a monumental wall made up of rectangular bundles tied with steel wire. Contrary to the idea of the book as an object of dialogue designed to be leafed through, archives are essentially places where memory is only stored – sealed, passive, organized, asleep, covered by the dust of time, buried in the darkness of oblivion. Archives are graveyards wherein lie the last remainders of our societies’ codified messages. They are arranged chronologically but otherwise undifferentiated, piled, packed, buried deep in the obscurity of time. Archives remind us of a bygone past, and only every now and then we are tempted to lift the corner of the veil covering it. Recanati erected this monument to archives knowing that, beyond their mystery, they come to compensate for the weaknesses, shortcomings, omissions, and oversights of our collective memory. Archives allow us to discover things unknown to us and remind us of things we have forgotten.

The theme of archives caught the eye of contemporary artists such as Christian Boltanski (b. 1944), Hanne Darboven (1941-2009), or On Kawara (b. 1932), who unveiled their objective aspects and the accumulative structures of their endless growth. Recanati reveals to us their tragic and indispensable nature. These archived bundles are as mysterious as they are ephemeral. The mystery of the invisible has attracted many a modern artist, starting with Man Ray (1976-1890), who in 1924 published in the first issue of La révolution surréaliste a photo of his work The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse (1920). This object wrapped in a blanket and tied with ropes and the title that Man Ray gave it suggest something that escapes our eyes and remains enigmatic. In a similar vein, Christo (b. 1935) wrapped in the beginning of the 1960s a series of consumer goods. These objects’ identity is often preserved, and nevertheless they are transformed by their wrap; at other times they remain anonymous, packed in a parcel that completely hides their identity.

It is interesting to compare Recanati’s overhanging bundles in Diaries with the huge suspended bundle installed by Jannis Kounellis (1936-2017) in 1997 at Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Both artists shared the same unconscious will to convey the bundle’s weight and to make it visible while keeping its contents concealed and protected. In spite of the different contexts of their works, both impart their creators’ sense of moral responsibility in the face of history and their time.

The work of Korean artist Soo-Ja Kim (b. 1957) is close, in more than one way, to that of Dina Recanati’s. Soo-Ja Kim’s bundles, made of colorful Korean clothes, are a direct expression of the concept of a journey. Indeed, as the artist herself affirms, “[…] in Korea, ‘to bundle’ means ‘to leave a place,’ or ‘to go further’.” Soo-Ja Kim considers that her Bottari (bundle) suggests “new possibilities for conveying buried memories and pains, as well as life’s quiet passions.”*** Dina Recanati’s bundles, too, convey loss, pain, separation, uprooting.

These two artists’ bundles bear the marks of the different circumstances of their lives and the different generations and cultures to which they belong. However, the grievous suffering and hardships they have endured connect them. If they have succeeded in overcoming them, it is thanks to their art and to those bundles they carry in the hope of finding a safe haven.

Bundles are short-lived by definition, they are untied every now and then and necessary items are taken out of them in the course of one’s travel from one stop to next. Dina Recanati tells the story of this artistic unpacking which is, no doubt, a courageous act of surrender, but which also allows for the birth of new hopes. The artist unties her bundles, knowing that in doing so she defies the logic of their packaging; or in other words, knowing that theirs was a provisional reality from the start. Now it’s all about how to generate, out of the provisional chaos of unbundling, a new order inspired by the artist’s creative imagination.

Thus, begins a new cycle in her work which will bear the traces of past memories, but will also metamorphose by virtue of a vision of a future full of promise.

Open Bundles

Recanati unties the ropes that secured the bundle, opens and empties it and flattens the canvas which had wrapped it. Losing its volume and shape, the bundle no longer exists and the mystery as to its invisible contents seems to have been vanished. In a certain sense, the bundle has shrunken, and all that is left of it is its material wrapping which testifies to its past existence. On the surface of the canvas, brownish hues form an amorphous vertical block, crisscrossed with unequal strips and dissected by short streaks. These faint lines look almost like huge scars running across a body. They attest to the canvas’s previous role as a wrapper of a bundle, back then when it was still tied with ropes and folded. For the loss of the bundle compensate the appearance of a work, whose monumental and poignant nature has an air of primary truth. In her “Open Bundles” series (2004-5), Recanati is resolved to take risks. Letting go of one of her previous practices, she accepts, as it were, its symbolic death, to be able to give birth to something new. Recanati applies the principle of the cycle of life and death to her own work. Already in 1984, she said that “creativity is often reconstruction”; she is aware that recycling materials from earlier works allows for new approaches, and in a text written long before “Open Bundles,” she analyzed this situation: “We sometimes seem to make essence out of accidents or we confer a defining function upon external properties. I believe the use of accident is not accidental, it is unconsciously designed.” Therefore, this series reflects the artist’s realization that some consequences of an act of creation are unpredictable, and that she must pay heed to her inner voice which may lead her to shores she did not know existed.

While flattening the canvases of her bundles, it dawned on Recanati that she had

returned to painting. Such a return would occur several times, and we shall delve into it later. For the moment, suffice it to say that she felt a need to invoke in her painting the three-dimensional world of her bundles and the mystery of their contents. The painted canvases of the bundles have lost their initial function, and Recanati thought of a new meaning she could ascribe to them within the framework of a pictorial reality. In the middle of large rectangular canvases tacked to a wall, she installs a T-shaped wooden structure on which she fixes canvases whose folds drape according to a preconceived rhythm. Both the front and the background canvases are tinted with shades of violet, brown and blue mixed with a rich range of grays. The canvases in the foreground seem to be hanging from the shoulders of an invisible body. These draperies attached to an invisible structure reminded me of a drawing by Albrecht Dürer I saw some time ago in Vienna’s Albertina – Woman in Netherlandish Dress Seen from Behind (1521). In that drawing, the drapery begins from the woman’s head and covers her entirely. The figure with its white highlights stands out against the black background tinted violet-gray. The effect is of great sobriety. Both were using a very similar palette, but whereas Dürer focused on the representation of the drapery and the mystery of the invisible body, Recanati confers upon her drapery mystery that blends into the background and yet stands out due to a chiaroscuro effect created by the relief.

In other works, the bundle seems untied but as yet not emptied of its content, which

still hides behind the painted, expressive folds of the canvas. These works are reminiscent of Magritte’s (1898-1967) painting The Lovers (1928) where the heads are covered with a canvas that hides their features but not their existence. Magritte, that great magician of presencing the invisible, created several paintings on this theme.

Dina Recanati continues the series by using these painted canvases in space and by making them drape from the top of a man-sized column. The work’s dramatic power resides in this mass of fabric attached to the invisible column’s top and its draping folds that reach the ground. Donatello’s marble statue Habakkuk (1423-25) reveals a structure and even a color range which are oddly close to those of Recanati’s work. In both sculptures, the suspended heavy folds have a presence that asserts itself independently of their respective bearers. It seems that unconsciously, intuitively, Dina Recanati is drawn to the very sources of European artistic tradition which she had the opportunity to study in the course of her numerous travels.

Samurai

The “Samurai” cycle (2004-05) continues that of the “Open Bundles,” while taking it to new directions. In the newer cycle, the T-shaped structure is not only visible but also clearly controls the work. A vertical bar creates a sort of a spine located in the middle of the work, and a horizontal bar defines the work’s width and upper limit. Whereas in the “Open Bundles,” the artist recycled canvases from her previous bundles; in the “Samurai” cycle, she utilizes old or recent paintings which she cuts into wide straps, affixes them to

the horizontal, upper bar and lets their ends fall down in right angles. What we see here is the opposite process of “Open Bundles.” Recanati uses segments of painted canvas to create three-dimensional works which nevertheless have a frontal character to them. In addition, these works do not have a flat, rectangular background; each of their free forms derive from a structure previously defined by the artist. These objects resemble samurai costumes, which are equally made of horizontal strips and a large cape that hangs from the warriors’ shoulders. Bespeaking of strong will and inner tension, these works have something sharp and almost aggressive about them, which stands in an eloquent contrast to the spiritual softness of the draperies in “Open Bundles.” The works of both cycles have this in common that they represent metaphors for a human presence and result from a transformation, in the process of which a pictorial reality is destroyed bringing forth a new artistic reality. Dina Recanati’s ample use of the blue color in the “Samurai” cycle is also evocative of Japan where a herbal version of this color, the indigo, is often employed. Let us look into a few passages from Recanati’s text dedicated to this cycle: “[…] he who will have submitted his senses to test of indigo, […] will know the infinite miracles of the indigo blue, its indescribable virtues and their myriad variations […] the eye quivers at the memory of such a pale passage of blue […] at the end of the range there are the black blues, dark blues with more harsh and brutal sonorities […] this natural indigo is erased, takes on shadows, and makes the warp and the weft of the canvas it colors glimmer and shine. It possesses the unutterable quality of reflecting passing or evanescent nature […] Japan takes delight in the transient.” Dina Recanati found in these blues that range from azure to black-blue the richness of the indigo blue which is used in Japanese to denote twenty-five distinct hues. In her “deep journey into the universe of indigo blue,” she simply followed the blues of the sky and of the sea or just those found in dreams. The “Samurai” cycle comprises five objects in relief and two sculptures, each work presenting an indissoluble unity of matter, shape, color and meaning. These works are neither painted objects nor paintings turned into objects, but rather the result of a simultaneous fusion of all these dimensions and are as evident as butterfly wings or flower petals.

Totem 

With Totem (2005), Dina Recanati seems to have unpacked a few bundles, replacing their malleable contents with rigid structures which she wrapped in recycled or especially painted canvases, and partly tied with ropes. The top of these tilted totems leans against the gallery’s wall in a carefully preplanned order, albeit seemingly chaotic. Let us go back to the source of this idea, which she started to elaborate in 1989 in her work Leaning. Bear in mind that this was the period when she created, among other things, the Forest environment. This is how she described Leaning at the time: “A leaning, making the composition active in a way. The wall is purposeful and that sculpture will not hold without the wall […] This work is not mute – Here I am not dealing with mass, but with space […] The interaction between the shapes and their environment.” In Totem, the principle remains the same, but having created her bundles in the meantime, she feels a need to create a different invisibility than that of Leaning, which was composed of long closed rolls attached with ropes. In Native American beliefs, a totem pole is a sacred object which marks a place, symbolically linking the indigenous peoples to higher forces and generates order by regulating nature’s chaos.

Recanati’s totems are not vertical, they are not yet active but rather await some future spiritual function. These are “spare” totems, representing transition, maybe even uncertainty.

Since they only exist thanks to the wall, they assume an unstable position and have an air of fragility but also of possible continuity.

Freedom of Color

Dina Recanati has for a long time explored materials and space before taking the high road of color. She first experimented with it during a forced hiatus in her activity as a sculptor in 1980. Using paper in different colors and a pair of scissors, she created a group of abstract serigraphs in warm Mediterranean colors reminiscent of the sand and the sky, day and night, the undulation of the dunes and the water. These works were meditations on the infinity of space and the magical power of color that equally express the absoluteness of nature and the vicissitudes of the soul. A little later, when she began painting her columns to enhance their spatial structure, she discovered the symbolic meaning of colors such as red, black and white. In her veneer and aluminum books, scrolls and rolls, she starts using paint to impregnate the wood with thin or semi-transparent tint, or splashing it onto these objects to load them with its inherently expressive urgency. The real experience of color therefore stems from her desire to underscore the message of her sculptures through a vocabulary of colored signs that would charge them with meaning as well as emotion.

In the end of the 1980s, Recanati created a series of works she called “Pour and Drip Paintings” which she never exhibited. It is worthwhile to dwell a little on these works, as they constitute an intermediary stage between her use of color in her earlier sculpture and her future utilization of it in the “Bundles,” “Diaries” and “Archives” series. This cycle of paintings is also important because it heralds future ones, indicating the artist’s growing interest in painting, both as an independent medium and as an inherently expressive means of her sculpting.

The techniques used by Recanati in this series were not new, they were already employed by Jackson Pollock (1912-56), Morris Louis (1912-62) and Helen Frankenthaler (1928 – 2011). However, for Recanati, a sculptor accustomed to the weightiness and constraints of other materials, their mobility and legerity must have represented a moment of freedom.

It is also interesting to note that she chose to present some of her paintings in the form of diptychs or larger groupings thus lending them an architectural metered structure and distancing them from the notion of easel painting, which she almost never practiced. The spatial conception of these works corresponds with her main preoccupation at the time.

The next step came when she started to work on her new series, “Firmament,” which was exhibited for the first time at the Tel Aviv museum of art in 2001. In her diary, she notes: “As of march 1992, I have finished 7 large canvases 350 x 250 cm [each], [and] also 5 smaller ones 250 x 200 cm [each]. Colors: to get ripples. Pour paint over when still a bit wet. Up to 24 hours. To get transparencies – pour much diluted colors over existing color. Kaki over black – black over kaki – pink over purple.” Recanati laid flat unstretched canvases on the floor and painted them. These works prepared her for the “Bundles,” “Diaries” and “Archives” series and some of them were later incorporated into these cycles. In the colors she used, earthy ochre-sienna is mixed with the blue-black of nocturnal sky, and the morning’s white illumination is contrasted with cloudy ominous grays. Resembling battlefields of telluric forces, these paintings make me think of the chaos of Genesis before the earth was separated from the heavens, night from day, the waters from the land, that is to say, before living beings were created. Having neither up nor down, Dina Recanati’s paintings are all about movement, showing the whole gamut of tears and rips of a conflicted soul; but, on the other hand, they do not shy from or despaired by the tumult of the external world.

She has been carrying their truth within her for very long, writing already in 1980: “I am engaged in a process of rebuilding, of creating order after the chaos, it is given to man and woman to begin again. A process of reconstruction, seeking the strength to mold smoke and ashes into a new world.” Describing the storm that agitates her inner world, the artist paraphrases Confucius, when she writes: “After the storm blows, then you know how resilient is the grass. We are all survivors of some terrible storm.” In one of her first notebooks, she wondered: “Torment, pains, you who tear the soul apart, you who tear the gut apart, are you the wind, the sublime storm which makes creation?” Painting is a necessity for Recanati, it allows her to stare at an image of these invisible swirls of the soul and to engrave them in memory in spite of their elusive fluidity, in spite of their chaotic contradictions. After the sublime storm of this painting, she was able to resume the course of her work by reuniting, in a remarkable symbiosis, spirit and matter, transient and solid, flexible and rigid, light and shade, visible and invisible, life and death, the future and the past.

Cosmos: Between Micro and Macro

Recanati created her “Cosmos” cycle of paintings between 1999 and 2002. The cyclecomprises over 150 paintings, measuring 22.5 x 15.5 cm each, mounted on a block of black wood. This is how she describes the very particular process of their making: “By 1999, I had developed the use of acid solutions enough to paint on small aluminum rectangular plates. I used diluted acids which, combined with metallic paints (iron, bronzes, copper), gave very exciting results. The intensity of the color often depends on how long you allow it to oxidize, anywhere from a few minutes to overnight. When I was satisfied with the level of oxidation, the pieces were carefully rinsed with water to wash the acid out and stop the process, dried and sealed with many layers of fixative. One has to watch the oxidation process, because time changes the color. One has to work fast. It is a challenge to control the process.” In her work as a sculptor, Recanati learned to control the different states of matter in order to obtain her desired forms and textures. We can mention for example the patina of the bronze sculptures, which, too, changes over time. The slightly reliefed works of this cycle call to mind Far Eastern miniatures. The sense of relief is accentuated by the black background against which the aluminum sheets stand out lending the work a spatial feel.

Quite a long time have elapsed since the “Firmament” cycle, and an added serenity pervades the “Cosmos” cycle. It seems that the artist now watches the world from a certain distance.

“Cosmos” describes a world in fusion, a whirl in which molten minerals flowing in the cosmic void are shaken by invisible currents. We could easily imagine that these images hail from remote worlds which are now being shaped, but just as easily we could believe that we are watching an unidentified microscopic reality. In both cases, these images transcend our everyday experience, not because they are defined as abstract but because they are undoubtedly figments of Recanati’s imagination; indeed, they come from the depths of an intuition that compels her to seek realities beyond our visible world. She shows us the limitations of the visible world as opposed to the boundless space of invisible universes.

She allows us to participate in this zooming-in and zooming-out process, extending our vertical vision from the infinitely small to the infinitely large.

Like a real art alchemist, Recanati mixes in her laboratory metals and pigments and supervises and controls the oxidation processes that melt and fuse the elements into a unique reality which is both visual and spiritual. Each of these images is an infinitely rich universe. In each of them, the elements’ interpenetration in movement and their celestial dance eventually reach a miraculous balance. It is in this moment of balance that Recanati stops the oxidation process and definitively freezes the image on the aluminum plate.

Putting to use an experience previously garnered of how to capture and give existence to the provisional, the transient and the fluid and make them communicable, she attains her wished-for continuity. The road goes on and that’s what matters.

Spirit and Matter

Dina Recanati started working on her “Gathering Winds” series (2006-08) out of a profound sense of inner necessity. The name she has given to this impressive ensemble of works in progress seems to indicate adverse winds blowing with great force. Could they possibly be the winds of an existential anxiety that the artist attempts to bring together in her works in the face of tormented world? One thing is certain: Their rigorosity and austere force express a drama of rare intensity. These works depict the commanding flow of life’s forces that traverse barren territories.

The reliefs, as well as the columns, the spheres and the books, continue a work that began half a century ago and has now been supplemented with a new dimension: Restricted to the most essential, each work unites a course of lines creating a spatially dense, agitated relief that casts its shadows and gains its color – that is often a particularly sophisticated nuance – from within its body. On various unstretched canvases (sometimes of cotton), she creates a relief of chaotic movements before painting it with a monochrome – or dominant – color. The colors are limited in number: Various earth and sand tones; a mineral or metallic black; a blue that arouses an aquatic or cosmic feeling; and finally, the white of pure light. These colors allude to the four constituent elements of the universe: Earth, water, air and light emanating from the solar fire.

Since 2000, Recanati has experimented with different qualities of canvas as a material allowing the formation of spatial configurations: First with her “Archives” and “Diaries,” then with the “Bundles” and “Open Bundles” series, and finally with the “Samurai” cycle.

The series “Gathering Winds” has its origins in an experience she did not pursue previously. It is with her creative intuition and her hands that she produces movements in relief with a canvas saturated in advance with a gel medium that makes it malleable before it dries up and hardens. These formless reliefs express consecutive raging, contradictory rhythms. Recanati invests the amorphous canvas with zones of contradiction, interspersed with moments of relaxation; she creates hollows and peaks and sets free sluggish or rapid currents. Finding a sense of equilibrium between the forces that shake them and their own seemingly immutable movements, these baroque reliefs preserve the visual and tactile memory of their vitality. In keeping with their structure and colors, they evoke geological folds or aquatic movements.

These centerless reliefs sweep across the surface like a hurricane coming from elsewhere and blowing towards the unknown; the limits of the canvas are congruent with those of our vision and we can imagine them continuing to infinity.

The “all-over” character of Recanati’s pictorial surface follows in the footsteps of Jackson Pollock but, in place of his successive layers of drippings, she achieves intensity and depth through her dazzling dense reliefs that cover the entire surface. As if observed from a distance, we see the topography of an unidentified planet, whose frozen geological hollows bear witness to a whirlwind expelling emptiness and creating a labyrinthine, indecipherable course. However, despite their seemingly spontaneity, these images are the result of the artist’s precise vision. Unique as each of her works is, they all bespeak of a style, and share a message on the complexity of the world and the necessity to keep on moving so that the “gathering winds” could lead us to our goal.

Afterword

Revisiting her works, they bring to mind those of several European artists of the late 1950s / early 1960s. First of all, there are the “Texturologies” and “Topographies” of JeanDubuffet (1901-85), who taught us the importance of observing that just “skims” over the terrain; for example, in his Terre mère (1959-60) where he emphasizes the metaphor of the earth as the existential crucible. Then there are the minimalist folds of Achromes (1958-60) by Piero Manzoni (1933-63), who ascribes to the painting the status of an object.

This characteristic is also found in the work of Dina Recanati who, however, does not abandon the aura of a significant image. When dealing with her monochromatic painting, we should also consider Yves Klein’s (1928-62) cosmic vision in his Relief planétaire bleu (1961) as well as in many of his other works. Klein and Manzoni, who both died prematurely, belong to the same generation as Recanati. One aspect these three artists have in common is their profound need to go beyond the appearances of the visible and develop a vision that, using the materials of the world, permits them to reveal certain truths of the invisible universe.

In her quest for a “different” reality, Recanati has returned to the column that has been present in her work since 1972. As mentioned before, it was originally cast in bronze and then created with sheets of aluminum, and finally reappeared with painted veneer wood.

The human-sized column in “Gathering Winds” is square, its volume covered with a cloth whose folds and rustlings are painted blue. Its reliefed verticality possibly alludes to the sculptures of the Olympian gods with the pleats of their tunics flowing down their bodies.

They are firmly positioned on the ground but their being is of a cosmic nature and Recanati’s blue column also conveys a similar sense of ascension. This interpretation of the column as the axis of the world, uniting the earth with the celestial spheres is reinforced by the appearance of a new element in Recanati’s work: The sphere. Her spheres are of various sizes and are placed on the ground. They are covered with planetary reliefs, and painted blue or white. Placed in space, they form the beginning of a planetary system: White for the solar light, blue for the mineral, aquatic night of a planet. They form a totality that can be approached from any direction. To complete this microcosm, a blue relief placed on a support adds a horizontal dimension, the basis from which all momentum soars upwards.

Dina Recanati does not forget the human factor and represents it with the book, the visual reflection of our accumulated memory. Appearing in her work since 1976, the book has undergone many alchemic transmutations – from gold to bronze, and from aluminum to a painted surface. The stratified planetary layers make it an object engulfed in a greater sense of mystery than ever before. Its compressed energy communicates to us images of an intuitive and personal cosmology. These images invite us to share in a reflective, tormented intimacy and, simultaneously, also urge us to join Recanati in her search for the secrets and origin of the “Gathering Winds.” The artist introduces us to this quest in several unforgettably beautiful moments mediated by her images’ truthfulness and beauty.

Before she started to work on her installation Stories II (2015-17), Recanati composed her “Fingerprints” made of dramatic, dark, intense, compact small-format rectangular works.

Each rectangle is occupied by a sign in relief, whose material can be likened to a congealed movement, a frozen cry, an ultimate message we should decipher. The concentrated nature of these works reflects the artist’s urgency to deliver to us what she feels in the innermost parts of her being. The wind of the spirit and the matter meet at the heart of these work.