Through October Colin Cina

An offspring of Russian-Polish immigrants, he adopted the name ‘Cina’ in honour of the metalworking occupation his family had pursued, as in Polish the word means ‘tinner’. He drew attention to himself in the sensation-stirring collective show entitled New Generation, staged in the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1966, where he presented his bright and light-coloured pictures of surrealistic formal ideas built on geometrical structural backbones. The tiny organic forms derive, he claims, from Kandinsky. Through October was made a year earlier, the year of Cina’s debut. The painting, combined of two picture panels, is bound together visually by the structural construct of triangles assembled tangram-like. The symmetrical perspectivic scaffolding is enlivened by the merry web of winding organic forms. Constructivism gained an even greater weight in Cina’s later work when in a major series he investigated the architectural details of swimming pools bared to the utmost.

Ferenc Tóth