MILAN.- The grandeur of painting, the grandeur of the themes that crawl like veins through a dark side of the psyche, the iconographic grandeur that emanates from the subconscious mind, dragging one into the depths of darkness, of fears, and those fears that instill a resistance we must not wish to escape. There is a majestic dignity to the canvas, which possesses an unusual immersive quality.

In this vast dimension of painting, within the daily temporal filter, in that specific hour that marks the birth of the day, Daria Dmytrenko captures the literary hour where the darkness of sleep, the waves of resting consciousness, crash within us, resisting the light and awakening.

An hour experienced in the music of Alberto Savinio in his historic composition “Chant de la mi mort”, where even the title reflects the absence of a vigilant consciousness, and where the philosophical speculation of dream activity deep- ens with meditations and ghostly, fleeting visions.

It is an hour from which writers like Colette have been able to extract almost automatic pages of lived life and painters like Norbert Schwontkowski have chosen as the hour of visions. An hour that, for Dmytrenko, sparks the urgency behind each of her canvases.

In this centenary year of 2024, commemorating the Manifesto of Surrealism, Daria Dmytrenko, free from any academ- ic suggestion and empty epigonism, develops the relevance of this avant-garde, which had, in its gothic feminine side, great pioneering protagonists of a new frontier of perception. Leonora Carrington, Leonor Fini, for example, created that feminist stronghold of painting that supports research in an international community that remains active and emerging.

A silent but powerful undercurrent animates her visionary mythological figures, among animalistic members with turbulent eyes. Mythologically, Daria Dmytrenko develops continuous archetypes, where the dark cultivates the boreal sense reflected in her vertiginous colors.

Teal, electromagnetic violet in the visible light spectrum, anthocyanins, chlorophylls, amphibian green, amaranth, dragon’s blood, indigo, magenta, cyan, fawn, khaki, amber, straw, sand, burnt sienna, taupe, callainite, cerulean, malachite, and the faded traces of ruby. A palette where the sense of Humor Noir seems to correspond to the surrealist anthology of the same name. A dark and ultra-sentimental palette that revives the soul of those “warm creatures” close to her, though they remain untamable beings.

She distances herself from everyday perception, eman- cipates herself from consciousness (which neuroscience defines as essential), and yet brings to the surface what the mind and brain, even when not present, revisit. Experiences comparable to those of alternative spiritual journeys, such as the use of ayahuasca or psilocybin, Daria Dmytrenko, the shaman of her painting, captures every bloom of her exclusive auroral experience.

The whorls of color are as dense as the Capriccios of musical compositions, seeking a fantastic wing of freedom. The brushstrokes are wide, the canvas flips and turns, recording the sinuosity of the vortices, appearing to us like clouds in indefinite horizons.

Nature instills awe, slipping into disbelief, the dance of forms blurring the inorganic, while the organic pulses and remains suspended as if belonging to the opening of Dino Campana’s Canti Orfici, reciting: “E del tempo fu sospeso il corso”.