Valentina Chiappini sees what she refers to as the “scratch” as her artistic signature. Using blades on her canvases lets her paint in what she calls a “nervous” style, adding a level of energy to her works that enhances their appeal to the viewer’s attention and emotions. But those scratches are just one of the aspects that make her canvases provocative. “In what I create on the canvas,” she says, “you can find a blend of poetry, music and revolution.” The result is a powerful one, combining loaded imagery with words in several languages and a painting technique which contains echoes of stencils and printing.
Chiappini also has a distinctive color sense, moving from bold blocks of red and black to pastel washes that contrast with the visceral subject matter around them. With their close ties to street art, her paintings bring the work of Warhol and Basquiat to mind, but Chiappini’s elegant sense of composition puts her work in a category all of its own.