Lino Dinetto (1927) - Composizione, Le Amiche

AUTHOR

Lino Dinetto (born 1927) Italian painter. He was born in Este (Padua); still very young he trained between Venice and then Milan, where even as a teenager he deepened his painting with masters such as Mario Sironi and Carlo Carrà, coming into contact with the core issues of Futurism and especially Metaphysical art. In these years a poetics takes shape that brings together the lesson of Venetian colorism, direct observation (also en plein air in the Euganean Hills) and a search for order, harmony and the “thought of color” as the mental structure of the image, rather than a simple naturalistic rendering.

In the early 1950s he moved to Uruguay, to Montevideo and its surroundings, where he developed a decisive period, working on large cycles of sacred art and murals (including the years-long engagement tied to the Cathedral of San José) and also teaching from 1955 to 1960 at the Instituto de Bellas Artes San Francisco. In that context, in contact with the local environment (and with the orbit of Taller Torres García), his painting tends to loosen up: alongside figuration, more synthetic constructions and spatial rhythms emerge, pushing toward a transfigured figuration and sometimes approaching abstraction, always sustained by an intense palette and an emotional tone that Uruguayan museum sources describe as full of joy and freshness.

Having returned to Italy in 1960, he continues to weave sacred commissions with an increasingly freer easel-based production, where Venetian landscapes, still lifes, and above all the female figure reappear with renewed force, often filtered through a symbolic and contemplative imagery. On the exhibition front, the major retrospective “A Station for Art: Dinetto” at Venezia Santa Lucia (1997) is documented and, later, “Harmonia” in Treviso (2010–2011), “Forma e Bellezza” in Este (2013) and “Aurum, Between Sacred and Profane” in Vittorio Veneto (28/11/2014–11/01/2015), in addition to the 2007 retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, “Dinetto. Master of Color.” As for public collections, works such as Paisaje (1958) and Puerto No.18 (1958) are listed in the Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales (Montevideo). In Uruguay his production is also recognized at an institutional level: a presidential resolution declares it a historic monument (29/01/2004) as part of his artistic output, including works located in religious settings.

Description

"Composition, The Friends", mixed technique of ink and acrylic on panel, 46×51 cm with frame, 33×38 cm the panel alone, 1970, signed at the bottom left. On the verso a handwritten note by the artist reporting the date, title of the work, dedication, and signature.

The panel presents two female figures captured in a close dialogue, almost half-bust, posed in profile and three-quarter view, facing each other. The faces are defined by a few essential and recognizable marks—the line of the nose, the barely indicated eye, the mouth—while the bodies resolve into overlapping planes and abrupt patches of material. The impression is that of a suspended encounter, intimate but not narrative: more than telling an episode, the work stages an emotional relationship.

The composition is built to counterbalance: the left figure, lighter and more “open” toward the background, is balanced by the right figure, denser and more restrained, almost framed by a dark hatch-drawn rectangle that functions as a quinta and as a field of intensification. The ink drawing establishes the structure with a nervous design, made of rapid strokes and hatchings, while the acrylic intervenes with glazes and broken areas of color, letting the grain of the panel surface emerge and creating effects of abrasion, scraping, and transparency. The chromatic play is dominated by a cold gray-blue background, on which warm flesh tones, beiges, and browns emerge; to the right, a bright red accent interrupts the muted range and gives rhythm to the whole, like a sudden note within a controlled tonal scale.

In 1970 Dinetto often confronted the figure, particularly the feminine, as a place of memory and feeling rather than a descriptive portrait: here his poetics is found in the tension between recognizability and dissolution, between the line that defines and the color that “thinks” space. The work belongs to a mature season in which the artist works by synthesis, reducing anecdote and instead seeking the essence of a human climate.

Condition Report

Overall condition is good. The artwork is intact in every part with vivid, well-rendered color and brushwork. The frame is included at no charge.

Tracked and insured shipment with adequate packaging.