ABOUT
The pictorial research of Valentina Grilli moves from a deep and painful meditation on experience and memory of the individual, what is ineffably past, consumed and already experienced: the subjects hover in space suspended and silent, where time seems to contract to give voice on those experiential layers from which the artist's investigation originated.
In the XI Book of Confessions, meditating on the concept of time, Augustine of Hippo said that "this is the memory of the past"; nothing seems to be more true for the artist, who pushes herself and the viewer to dig into the folds of memory to find the deepest roots of their own identity.
The works of Valentina can be defined as a reflective self-awareness, experiential and emotional, in which the artist tries to give substance to an inner energy through revealing images of a continuous relation-clash with herself; she herself is the subject and object in a steady recovery of clear or hidden memories.
Her subjects are skillfully orchestrated compositions, simple and essential, that introduce the viewer in a suspended dimension, almost between dream and waking; real images yet not completely tangible, fleeing and elusive - just like the memories - they are abstract legacy of our time and our lives.
This slow and painful process of archeology of the soul is a fight-play with time, in which the sense of making art is to find, is recapture, is to bring us back to a long gone, intimate reality.