[Segno Online, di Veronica Zanardi, 21-03-25]

Apnea, the solo exhibition by Silvia Negrini at the Butti Contemporary Museum in Viggiù, will be on view from March 23 to May 25.

Silvia Negrini proposes a kind of painting that lies in a borderland, where figurative language is reduced to the essential, brushing against the dimension of abstraction without ever completely abandoning it.
The fourteen works presented show geometrically constructed environments, orderly landscapes, essential interiors, and rigorous architectural structures, in which the human presence is completely absent. And yet, these are not anonymous or alienating places, but rather spaces dense with meaning, suspended in a silence charged with tension and possibility.
The element that strikes in her expressive language is the extraordinary formal synthesis. Smooth and uniform surfaces, treated with enamels and flat colors, eliminate any trace of gesture, returning a purified image, where every line and every spatial relationship obeys a precise logic.
Negrini constructs painting as a system of internal relations, in which forms emerge through geometric schematizations that evoke a decanted reality, reduced to its essence.
Despite this apparent executive coldness, the compositions do not appear sterile or detached. On the contrary, their meticulous construction generates an unexpected evocative force, stimulating in the viewer an active perception of space.
The painted architectures—empty rooms, motionless swimming pools, abandoned playing fields, vegetationless hills, islands—seem to anticipate an event, an occurrence that never manifests.
This sense of waiting, combined with the cleanliness of the representation, recalls the suspended atmosphere of metaphysical painting, though without sharing its symbolic or narrative dimension.
Negrini’s research fits into the tradition of analytical painting, understood as an investigation into the linguistic structures of representation. Her work does not seek to reproduce an objective reality, but rather to explore the way space and forms are perceived and organized on the pictorial surface.