Dia Manesi develops a thematic language closely connected to the notion of personal and collective heritage. The forms that emerge within her compositions evoke bodily imprints, everyday ghosts, traces of experience without fixed boundaries. The image becomes a field of continuous negotiation with time. Space operates as a narrative tool and activates the viewer’s reflection on memory, trauma, and the desire for continuity or transformation.

Each composition shapes a visual and conceptual field marked by strong rhythm and meticulous detail. Concepts such as fate, origin, the need for resistance, and the threshold between survival and freedom are articulated in a way that gives weight to material and representational relationships. Her imagery functions both as a site for the inscription of experience and as a field of thought.

Manesi’s compositions connect historical references with an insistence on personal testimony. Painting is transformed into a field that manages tensions and inheritances. The image is inscribed in space, acquires rhythm, and reconfigures the traditional relationship between vision and interpretation. The composition becomes a bearer of memory, and the experience of the work is activated through the multiplicity of its visual and narrative points. Painting emerges as a tool for reading identity, loss, and the need for interpretation.

Through its sequential and contemplative construction, the image acquires duration and situates itself within the historical continuity of contemporary art with consistency and expressive completeness. Manesi’s painting practice belongs to contemporary explorations that expand the field of the image into space. Her compositions follow an installation-based logic, forming structures that exceed the surface of the canvas and place the viewer in direct relation with the materiality of the work.

Her technical choice of Plexiglas allows painting to incorporate light, projection and refraction, proposing a different mode of perceiving the image. Narrative emerges through temporal sequences, internal layers and crossings of gaze. Furthermore, it lends the works a distinctive materiality grounded in transparency, reflection and succession. The successive surfaces are organised with precision, generating an internal rhythm. The viewer’s gaze acquires direction, pauses and shifts as it moves through the painted layers.

This artistic approach relates to the trajectories of expanded painting that began to take shape in the late twentieth century and continue to evolve as installation-oriented painting practices. The image gains depth through multiple surfaces and enters the realm of time, experience and mediation. Painting no longer remains confined to the flat plane but constructs a spatial mechanism in which memory is inscribed through layers, details and material weight.

These elements situate the work within the spatially hybrid fields of post-painterly contemporary practice. It may be placed within the framework of Mixed Media painting (where the painted surface becomes object/hybrid), as well as within the post-2000 tendency to break the flat image into painting that expands into the third dimension, into painting-as-object. The act of placing each work within a Plexiglas box transforms painting into a “small-scale installation”; even the slightest shift or change in viewing angle renews the experience.

In this way, the work may be associated with currents such as post-painting (painting that examines and moves beyond the traditional canvas), installation-oriented painting, and painting that engages with space/time as an active condition. The work is not merely an image but a space of thought, social presence and temporality. The visual outcome surpasses the static nature of the image and offers an experience open to interpretation and reflection. The work proposes a mode of existence that connects memory with materiality and painting with spatial contemplation. The confrontation with light, time and form generates a dynamic system of image, within which new possibilities of perception are activated.

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Paris Kapralos
Art Curator