Silence

Chiara Silvano is an Italian artist based in Venice whose work explores the subtle relationship between inner experience and lived reality. Her practice is rooted in painting and extends through the use of textiles, embroidery, and thread, which become integral elements of the pictorial surface. Silvano’s work arises from an urgent and instinctive need to give form to emotional states that exist in a suspended moment—on the threshold between what is happening and what is about to happen. Her paintings inhabit that fragile line where the ordinary can suddenly shift into the unexpected. Through this process, she investigates how inner worlds resonate with and are transformed by the external environment. Women occupy a central role in her visual narratives. Often approached through an autobiographical lens, her figures appear as fragments of a visual diary—quick annotations, fleeting sensations, intimate reflections. In this sense, Silvano considers her painting a visionary practice of perception and feeling rather than representation. In recent years, animals—particularly birds—have become recurring presences in her work. They function as symbolic figures, messengers of freedom, renewal, and reconnection with nature, suggesting the possibility of transformation and new beginnings. Oil painting is her primary medium, chosen for its immediacy and emotional depth. She paints quickly, guided by intuition rather than technical perfection, seeking the intensity of the gesture and the truth of the moment. Embroidery is introduced later as a slower, meditative act—one that stabilizes, fixes, and deepens the initial impulse. Each stitch becomes both a physical mark and a symbolic gesture, connecting the work to an ancient, feminine knowledge and creating a tactile, three-dimensional surface. Silvano’s practice is deeply informed by her multiple identities as artist, woman, mother, and daughter. These roles do not exist separately but continuously inform one another, shaping a body of work that moves between memory and vision, care and rupture, intimacy and resistance. Her artistic influences include Paula Rego, Frida Kahlo, Marlene Dumas, and Alice Neel, as well as the poetic and imaginative language of contemporary children’s illustration.