Dinu Corina - What the Flames Kept

Condition: As New
Material: Oil paint, acrylic paint, collage on canvas
Size: 60 × 40 cm
Colour: Gold, amber, charcoal black, burnt orange, crimson
Shipping method: Courier, fully insured, professional packaging
There are things that survive a fire. This painting is about those things.
What the Flames Kept is a mixed media work built in layers — collage elements laid into the canvas first, then covered, partially obscured, and partially revealed through successive applications of oil and acrylic paint. What remains visible from beneath the surface — fragments of image, text, human silhouette, architectural detail — were not placed there by accident. They are what the fire decided to keep.
The palette is gold, amber and charcoal black, with flares of burnt orange and deep crimson pushing through from beneath. The surface carries significant relief — paint applied in mass, scraped, dripped and pooled — giving the work a physical weight that photographs suggest but cannot fully convey. In certain light the gold reads as incandescent. In shadow, the black absorbs everything around it.
The upper left carries traces of geometric mark-making — lines and forms that read as script, as architecture, as memory — while the lower register dissolves into pure chromatic energy. The tension between order and destruction is the subject of the work.
Technique: Oil and acrylic paint, collage, impasto, dripping
Style: Abstract Expressionism / Art Informel / Mixed Media
Year: 2024
Edition: Unique — 1/1
Signed: Yes
About the artist:
What the Flames Kept is a work by Corina Dinu, a Romanian artist born in 1979 with formal training in fine arts and design, including studies at Istituto Marangoni. Driven by a lifelong passion for beauty in all its forms, Corina works across painting, sculpture, and fashion — creating objects that are at once technically demanding and visually immediate. Her paintings belong to a practice of accumulation and excavation: layers built until the surface tells the truth about what lies beneath.