Julien Dinou
Julien Dinou; digital catalogue raisonné
16.8.1895 Cairo, † 24.1.1983 Bern.
Julien Dinou (Arnold Neuweiler) was a painter, writer, actor, stage-manager, director, engineer, art historian, and entrepreneur, with a background in chemistry. He held close friendships with the artists Otto Nebel & Paul Klee.
Dinou could claim the title of Renaissance man. Nothing of what is human is foreign to him. He made contributions in the field of scenography and he published the art historic book Painters of Geneva.
On a technical level his paintings reveal the spirit of discovery, of a passionate researcher. Dinou is neither a dilettante, nor a painter exclusively in love with an art founded on scientific bases. "God made nature", he declares. "Man asked himself what was left to do. God said to him: You still have art, but art should not be a slavish copy of nature."
Dinou, who was trained as an expressionist painter, has developed a pictorial language that bears only his own stamp. His work slips through the cracks of interpretations and deviates from the norm. During his travels in France and Germany, in Italy, Greece and Spain, in Turkey and North Africa, Dinou records his visual sensations, but never imitates appearances. He freely interprets the data and themes he borrows from the enchanted world that is the physical universe. He transfers them and reconstructs them.
The mode of vision he adopts, however distinctive, derives from the experiences of neo-impressionist painters. Its tones posed by irregular keys make vibrant surfaces. His motifs emerge from this mosaic of rich polychrome and melt into the blaze of colored pigments that destroy its contours. The two poles of his art are fiction and reality. Dinou creates a neo-figurative style composed of rigorously abstract elements.
- Waldemar-George, art historian
Info
Curriculum
About
Essay about his work
Julien Dinou; Constructing Expressionism
Digital Catalogue raisonné
Early work Expressionist ~ Figurative paintings
Main body Expresonist ~ Abstract paintings
Late work Geometric ~ Abstract paintings
Pastel Pastel / Watercolor paintings on paper
Drawings Work on paper
Catalogue raisonné [Edition 1. 2023]
Book & downloadable PDF containing all the known works, ordered and numbered will follow in the near future.
Julien Dinou - Formen der Abstraktion PDF
1996 Exhibition Catalog for Amnesty International