CAMBRIDGE, UK.- Investigating the relationship between words and image, combining poetry and painting is the central theme of Stella Dina's solo exhibition at New Hall, the women's college of the University of Cambridge.

From 4th November to 3rd December the college's exhibition space displays her new collection titled "Compendio: palabras y pintura" (Compendium: words and painting), through which the italian painter and designer continues her analysis of this relationship and pays a tribute to the andalusian poet and dramatist Federico García Lorca.

Without the smallest intention of providing new and different interpretations of a complex lyric such as Lorca's, Compendio is simply intended to be a sequence of small frames through which the author resumes and tries to convey her own emotional response to the engagement generated by reading Lorca's poems and studying his writings and his short but intense life.

It's almost impossible in fact to approach this real giant of the XX century literature leaving his personal vicissitude out of consideration.

Federico García Lorca was only 38 years old when he was slaughtered by franquist militia and buried in a mass grave together with other opponents of the coming regime.

The same way the nazis destroyed Jewish books in Germany, also his poems were burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen and were soon banned from Francisco Franco's Spain.

It's exactly from this point that Stella Dina begins her journey inside the world of García Lorca.

From the cry of pain and sorrow that Antonio Machado wrote to mourn the death of his friend, in a sort of fellow feeling she creates in fact "El Crimen" (The Crime), the artwork that synthetically represents the Manifesto of the whole collection, the rest of which embraces references to passages both from celebrated poems such as "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías",

"Poeta en Nueva York" and "Romancero Gitano" and from less-known poetries such as "Los encuentros de un caracol aventurero" or "Canciònes bajo la luna".

Stella Dina's investigation goes even beyond, exploring the secret territory of writings and thoughts underpinning Lorca's poetics.

For example she gives form to the struggle of the "Duende", a spanish word which can hardly be translated into another language, literally means elf, sprite.

According to the theory advanced by García Lorca during the conference "Teorìa y juego del Duende" (Theory and play of the Duende) held in La Habana de Cuba in 1930, the Duende is the mysterious and ancestral force, the small interior demon who may lead the way to achieve the highest level of creative intensity.

From a technical point of view, the nucleus of the collection displayed at Cambridge is made up of a sequence of small sized acrylics on canvas onto which the artist assembles a vast array of materials such as paper, sand, plastics, small fragments of wood, ready-made objects etc. and then intervening with sharp incisions and carved or painted writings.

Words and phrases are extracted from the literary source and plunged into the painting composition revealing their own capability of communication, unbound from the original poetic context, becoming subject in its own right.

New Hall at the University of Cambridge permanently displays also a large art collection by contemporary women artists.

From 4th November until 3rd december 2006, open to the public daily from 10am to 6pm. Free admission.