SILVIA NEGRINI – APNEA

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

“There are certain imaginaries that seem impossible to translate into something visible, tangible,” writes Rossella Farinotti. “It takes real skill to do so. In her studio, Silvia Negrini, while describing certain details and moving from one painting to the next, points to a surface in dark tones. The piece is composed of two clearly defined sections, marked by her distinctive way of painting, favoring a limited chromatic range and the Greenbergian flatness typical of animated cartoons—but refined and densely layered. I ask her whether the lower portion represents the sea, albeit a dark-colored one, and whether the upper section somehow evokes a sky, a horizon. The artist explains that the image is drawn from The Odyssey. ‘The wine-dark sea,’ reads one of the epic’s translations. It truly is a sea the color of wine—how could I not have thought of that right away?”

Silvia Negrini’s painting occupies a borderland where figurative language is reduced to its essence, brushing against the edge of abstraction. Her works depict geometrically structured environments, orderly landscapes, minimal interiors, and rigorous architectural forms, all completely devoid of human presence. Yet these are not anonymous or alienating places; rather, they are spaces rich with meaning, suspended in a silence charged with tension and potential. Her extraordinary formal synthesis, achieved through flat, uniform surfaces painted with enamels and solid colors, produces a purified image in which every line and spatial relationship follows a precise logic.
Despite the apparent coldness of execution, the compositions are neither sterile nor detached. On the contrary, their meticulous construction generates an unexpected evocative force, prompting an active spatial perception in the viewer. The painted architectures seem to await an event—something that never actually happens. This sense of waiting, combined with the absolute clarity of representation, recalls the suspended atmosphere of metaphysical painting, though without sharing its symbolic or narrative dimension.
Negrini’s research aligns with analytical painting, conceived as an investigation into the linguistic structures of representation. Her work does not attempt to recreate objective reality, but rather to explore the way space and forms are perceived and organized on the pictorial surface.

Silvia Negrini was born in Sondrio in 1982.

She studied Painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, graduating in 2007. From 2020 to 2024, she taught at the Brera State Art High School in Milan; from 2019 to 2024, she was a lecturer in Artistic Anatomy at the School of Nude and Artefici of the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, and in 2022 she taught Painting Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence. In 2024, she was awarded the professorship in Painting Techniques at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, where she currently works.