Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to present Quiet People in Brussels, Dien Berziga’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. A graduate of the BA Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London in 2023, on this occasion, the artist is exhibiting sixteen previously unseen paintings as well as a few sculptures. From the most monumental works to the more intimate formats, all preserve the same sense of intimacy with the viewer. Scale becomes less a measure than a point of entry into the image.
A shower of gold seems to fall upon a figure contemplating a landscape ablaze. Coloured grids — like hopscotch squares drawn in chalk — structure the space as much as they disrupt it. Human silhouettes emerge between the hills. But perhaps it is only our eye which, seduced by the sensuous palette, gives itself over to reverie. A joyful melancholy hovers over these new paintings, whose forms seem constantly to play and search for one another, between appearance and disappearance.
As he paints, Dien Berziga summons intimate memories without ever seeking to impose their narrative. Indistinct figures take on the features of someone who was once dear to us; a space feels strangely familiar, though we cannot quite place it. Colour plays an important role in this process, giving rise to a sensory impression that brings these paintings close to the “colour sensations” evoked by Paul Cézanne. The works thus activate what our memory knows — or thinks it still knows — like the stories endlessly told by our grandparents, whose contours shifted with each retelling. Memory changes each time it is summoned.
The artist never begins a painting with a precise image in mind. He works through washes, covers over, erases, and allows the pictorial material to acquire a life of its own. While some areas become almost transparent, elsewhere layers accumulate and grow denser. This construction through layers is not unlike the landscapes of Per Kirkeby, themselves traversed by processes of sedimentation. The palette, made up of ochres and earth-like tones, seems both to rise from the depths and to herald the emergence of new growth. Several temporalities coexist within a single painting: what remains beneath the surface meets what has only just come into being.
Yet this brownish-purple red might also find its origin in the artist’s own memory, shaped by a childhood between Italy and China. In Parma, Dien Berziga was confronted from an early age with the presence of the past in façades, churches and public spaces. “My palette is quite specific, almost Italian, or ‘Parmesan’ in a way” he explains, referring to the colours of the architecture he grew up surrounded by. Yet this chromatic memory is formed between two territories: this particular red also recalls for him the walls of the Forbidden City, whose colour seems to have remained — somewhere — within him. Something perhaps even more deeply buried persists from China: calligraphy. It appears in his work not as a formal quotation, but rather as the unconscious persistence of gesture. To the sound of Italian songs that punctuated his childhood, Dien Berziga thus paints what lies secretly in the hand and in the body.
For several years, this reflection on memory and space has extended beyond the canvas. Dien Berziga creates small architectural structures combining wood, plaster, ceramic, metal and various found elements. These constructions resonate with Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space: “the places in which we have experienced daydreaming reconstitute themselves in a new daydream, and it is because our memories of former dwelling-places are re-lived as day-dreams that these dwelling-places of the past remain in us for all time.” In the artist’s work, they become spaces that are both physical and mental, places of refuge. Yet the shelter is never entirely closed. The nails surrounding these constructions introduce an ambiguity: what protects may also exclude. The boundary between intimate and shared space remains continually in motion.
This openness extends to the very meaning of the works, which the artist never seeks to fix. Each painting can be read both as a playground to explore and as an image gradually faded by time. It is then up to the viewer to recompose what they see through their own experiences, to fill in the gaps and construct their own narrative. The story is transformed one last time, passing from the one who paints it to the one who looks at it, before being, perhaps, told again.
-Marie Chappaz, Editorial Manager
