Carmen Dionyse

Critical text

Carmen Dionyse (1921–2013, Ghent) studied painting, printmaking, and applied arts at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, later specializing in ceramics. Most of her sculptures are of relatively small scale and figurative, with an emphasis on busts and faces or masks. Her characters embody an ontological feeling of solitude and remoteness, being the stylite a recurrent motif, alongside emblematic figures from ancient mythologies, ranging from the Biblical to Greek and Egyptian. Dionyse’s interest in the material and the technique led her to painstakingly experiments, often superimposing different layers of enameling and refiring the same piece up to ten times. This affords her sculptures a distinctive, unique quality, as they seem to be on the verge of melting into abstraction. From an iconographical point of view, Dionyse’s sculptures are often alluding or subtly quoting classical styles, reconfigured and transformed both in their shape and through a very peculiar use of color and materials. In 2002, the International Academy of Ceramics honored Dionyse as one of the world’s three seminal ceramic artists of the twentieth century.

Text by Jacopo Crivelli Visconti

The artist’s voice

In my work, this choice of solitude, closure and silence expresses itself through a slow and difficult process of creation, full of obstacles. The expression, concentrated in the eyes, must be tense and compelling, whether it be intense, serene, disturbing, painful or energetic.