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[Focus] Chiara Silvano, 4 birds in my Kitchen, 2024

07 April 2026

Chiara Silvano’s 4 Birds in My Kitchen (2024) presents a familiar interior that subtly slips out of balance. A slight spatial tension and the presence of embroidered birds, which appear almost superimposed, create a quiet sense of dislocation. Between coherence and disruption, the work opens a poetic, dreamlike reading of the domestic space.

Chiara Silvano, 4 birds in my Kitchen, 2024, Oil on canvas, embroidery, 70 × 70 × 4 cm

At first glance, the scene reads as a familiar domestic interior. The space is structured, the objects are in place, and the composition appears stable. On closer viewing, however, this stability begins to shift. The perspective feels slightly unsettled, and the objects appear placed rather than fully anchored, introducing a quiet tension. This quality may recall Bedroom in Arles (1988) by Vincent van Gogh, where the interior remains coherent while suggesting a subtle instability.

The presence of birds alters this reading. They do not belong to the scene in a literal sense, and their embroidered surface reinforces this distance, giving them a distinct status within the image, as if superimposed onto the space.

The viewer is held in a scene that remains legible yet slightly displaced, where the domestic setting opens onto a more ambiguous register. This reflects Chiara Silvano’s practice, where familiar spaces are gently shifted, allowing a quiet sense of poetry and dream to emerge.