chiara baccanelli

curated by Marco Tagliafierro

The contemplation of nature is undoubtedly the starting point of Chiara Baccanelli’s intellectual and artistic practice. A heightened nature, synthesized yet chromatically multiplied, traversed by luminous vibrations that render it at once real and visionary.

Chiara Baccanelli fully situates herself within a lineage of artists who have transfigured nature in order to grasp its intimate and cryptic qualities. Her nature, amplified in chromatic intensity—almost lysergic—assumes the consistency of a hologram. The brushstrokes seem to emerge from the canvas, foreshadowing actual physical protrusions. Painting does not remain surface: it tends toward the body, toward space, toward three-dimensionality. The concentration and rarefaction of brushstrokes, expressed through a plurality of gestures, do not respond to a logic of formal accumulation but to the necessity of constructing pictorial systems capable of interrogating the same nucleus from different perspectives. What emerges is an organism at once formal and informal, extended, heterogeneous, and internally tensioned.

It is nevertheless important to guide the viewer toward a more conscious reading of the work. On the surface one perceives the energy of the gesture, yet the work contains far more than a simple brushstroke. Each piece possesses its own compositional and structural identity, the result of a complex and stratified process that requires time and attention to be fully grasped.

Alongside oil painting, Chiara incorporates textile elements—stitched details in fabric, velvet, metallic pads—that from a distance dissolve into chromatic vibration, but up close reveal an unexpected material dimension. Points of glow emerge, luminous accents generated by metallic elements and gold leaf that interact with the real light of the space, altering the perception of the work depending on angle and distance. These insertions are not decorative but structural: they amplify visual memory, creating interferences between surface and depth, between painting and object.

At the core of the artist’s research lies the relationship between emotion and memory, understood as symbolic and affective sedimentation. Pathos, stripped of rhetoric, is treated as structure, as residue, as a trace inscribed within the depicted objects. Nature remains impressed upon the canvases as in the phenomenon of post-stimulus visual persistence: an image that apparently vanishes like a light signal, yet continues to live within memory.

Chiara Baccanelli is at once Dionysian and Apollonian: her painting expresses itself through oxymorons—it is impulsive yet controlled, blurred yet material. The painterly gestures evoke a performative dimension, and the paintings appear as the outcome of a happening that is both passionate and measured.

An international artist in her working methods, experimental capacity, and use of “other” materials beyond those traditionally associated with painting, Baccanelli also evokes cinematic suggestions: Federico Fellini, Wong Kar-wai, Michel Gondry. She can be situated within a genealogy that traces back to the backgrounds of Masaccio, passes through the Lombard Scapigliatura, Willem de Kooning, and Mario Schifano—artists who demonstrated a particular sensitivity toward nature, transfiguring and epistemologically redefining it.

Within this lineage, Chiara’s painting is never mere representation, but rather an energetic field, an expanded body, a perceptual device. A place where nature is not only observed, but traversed, stitched, stratified, and rendered luminous.