Silvia Idili - Visionary

Surrealist aesthetics emerged around the 1920s and encompassed all fields of artistic research. Specifically, in the visual arts, Surrealism sought to explore the human subconscious and translate it into artwork through a mechanical writing process based on dream analysis. Consequently, Surrealist artworks propose the representation of a dreamlike dimension, completely dissociated from reality. However, this representation often relies on a hyperrealistic formal rendering, precisely to paradoxically accentuate the illusory and ambiguous nature of the surreal dimension. Given the type of subjects she proposes, artist Silvia Idili can also be classified as a Surrealist aesthetic, but compared to the historical avant-garde, her work is entirely original, blending Symbolism and Metaphysics. The Sardinian-born painter develops this particular poetics of mystery and anxiety in two main types of subject matter. Choral scenes of everyday and family nature and portraits, mainly of women.

This work is part of the "Visionaria" series, in which Silvia Idili has developed one of the most recurring themes in her painting: the female portrait, manipulated in an enigmatic and disturbing way. Even the choice of subjects contributes to this atmosphere of unease: Silvia Idili's women seem to have emerged from old photographs, forgotten in some drawer. Their poses are conventional, their hairstyles elaborate and outdated, their clothes elegant and old-fashioned. Against the space, always dark and decontextualized, these faces stand out, ashen in color, pervaded by bluish hues. But the most unsettling element in this series of paintings comes from Silvia Idili's reversal of the very meaning of portraiture. Portraiture, in fact, has always served to reveal the subject's personality, especially through the gaze (it is said that the eyes are "the mirror of the soul"). In these paintings, however, the artist chooses to conceal the gaze, resorting to the key themes of her aesthetic: heavy draperies and geometric prisms. Here, then, the sense of mystery and unease is once again realized, in the attempt to conceal some uncomfortable truth, in the construction of an insurmountable barrier of incommunicability between subject and viewer. Formally, in the portrait series, Silvia Idili displays a greater attention to formal values ​​and a more accentuated plasticity. The figures create their own space within the concreteness of the volumes. The pictorial layering always remains fairly homogeneous, conveying that sense of rarefied objectivity typical of Silvia Idili's painting style.

Silvia Idili was born in Cagliari in 1982. She graduated from the Cagliari State Art School in 1999-2000 and lives and works in Milan. Silvia Idili works in painting and illustration. She approached oil painting almost by chance and has continued to use it ever since. Her dreamlike visions take shape within complex interior landscapes, composed of flat backgrounds and a few enigmatic elements that compel the viewer's gaze to linger on. Long established in the art world, Silvia Idili has exhibited her work in numerous shows both in Italy and abroad.

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