Silvia Stocchetto is an artist whose creative path is nourished by an intimate fusion between science and art, between analytical observation and poetic vision. Her training in Biological Sciences, enriched by a doctorate in Biochemistry and Biophysics, has allowed her to refine a gaze capable of grasping the meticulous texture of the invisible world: cellular textures, mitochondria, organic architectures that constitute the very breath of life. This approach, never abandoned, is transfigured into an artistic sensitivity which, far from limiting itself to the mere reproduction of reality, reveals its secret dynamics, translating them into an original imaginative dimension with surreal features.

To open, in chronological order, the exhibition itinerary of this personal exhibition is Gru coronata (2016), a painting of particular importance in Stocchetto's artistic career. In fact, it establishes the affirmation of a visual grammar destined to become a distinctive feature of her poetics in the following years.

The work imposes itself with an enveloping chromatic force: a warm monochrome pervades the composition, immersing it in a suspended, surreal atmosphere, in which the natural dimension and the imagination intertwine in a fragile and subtle balance.

At the center of the scene, among floating wooden fragments, the enigmatic figure of the crane stands out. His watchful gaze and his elegance make him the fulcrum of the visual narrative, while other animal presences emerge from the pictorial plot, like silent witnesses of an arcane and fragmented universe. The broken wood, with its sharp splinters and its unstable geometries, becomes a symbol of an existence poised between construction and dissolution, between permanence and transience.

Evolution 2 (2018) represents a moment of transition: nature, still free from the solitary aura of the idol that will soon dominate the painter's works, manifests itself here in a pulsating composition with a choral approach. The symbolic dimension of painting merges with a more fluid narrative, in which the landscape becomes a living organism, in continuous metamorphosis.

The gaze enters a dense labyrinth of intertwined branches and vines, a visionary forest where nothing is static. Broken lines and sinuous curves suggest an incessant process of growth and evolution, while the birds merge with the vegetation, becoming part of a vibrant and harmonious ecosystem despite its own chaos. Color is essential in this dynamic: the burnt earth and the browns of the branches contrast with the vivid greens of the vegetation, generating a visual tension that suggests an underground vital flow, a secret pulsation of matter.

In subsequent works, this pictorial language is further defined, giving life to increasingly immersive scenarios, populated by ancestral figures that embody the sacredness of nature. Stocchetto's "idols" emerge as archaic totems, enigmatic presences that transform the landscape into a symbolic space, in which reality is intertwined with the echo of ancient myths.

In Idolo (2018), this evolution manifests itself in its full expression. The work marks the start of the poetics of the idol, now become a hieratic icon immersed in a vegetal labyrinth of stylized and sinuous lines. The bird, with its steady gaze and its austere profile, emerges from a dense network of branches and stems that seem to dance in a musical rhythm, suspended between the natural and the dreamlike. The colour, brighter and more vibrant, amplifies the abstract tension of the work: deep ochers and intense greens intertwine in a visual synthesis that unites the organic world with the symbolic one. The idol, although rooted in its animal essence, transcends matter and becomes an emblem, an absolute presence that inhabits a timeless elsewhere.

With Idolo X (2021), the artist arrives at a new and further evolution of her language, pushing her research towards territories of a more pronounced surrealist origin. Here the animal figure takes on increasingly anthropomorphic features, dissolving the boundaries between human and natural, between the real and the visionary. The composition, complex and layered, is nourished by further architectural and musical elements that interact with the organic forms, giving life to an enigmatic and magically suspended environment.

The vegetal intertwinings become structures, the bodies hybridize with musical instruments and wooden fragments, outlining an inscrutable metaphysical enigma.

The delicate and sophisticated color palette plays with shades of blue, ocher and earth, enveloping the scene in a vivid diffused light. The idol here is no longer a fixed and solitary icon, but a creature in constant metamorphosis, an entity that defies all classification and invites us to immerse ourselves in a universe of dreams and mystery.

In this dialogue between science and art, between observation and vision, Silvia Stocchetto invites us to look beyond the surface, to immerse ourselves in a universe in which the microscopic becomes immense and the real transforms into a dream. Her idols observe us from a parallel world, witnesses of a nature that is never just what it appears, but which contains within itself the mystery of life itself.

What is alive in a still life?

This seems to me to be the question that arises from Silvia Stocchetto's painting. It is a philosophical question, of course, and, in fact, there is no shortage of philosophers. Sly, benevolent and enigmatic, he gives us the only smile of his life and invites us to keep the secret, he delivers us to silence.

Stocchetto's still lifes are immersed in silence, as well as grey. But it is a metallic grey, in which we feel the remote echo of vibrating bodies, of modern clangs, above all it is a silence in which, as if we put our ear to the ground along atavistic hunting trails, we feel the deaf vibration of the earth that reaches us from ancient, very ancient and, at the same time, futuristic times. The cauliflowers, the chickens, the utensils portrayed here as the human face was portrayed in the past are, in fact, the subjects of an ultra-modern painting. More modern than any modern, Stocchetto, similar in this to the poet Pasolini, observes them "from the extreme edge of some buried age", the gestures with which she paints them belong to the first acts of an "Afterstoria".

The history that took place prior to this meticulous and precise, yet non-exhibitionist, non-celebratory painting of the triumph of goods, prior to this affectionately melancholic painting, is the history of Modernity that has definitively estranged man from the nature from which he comes. There is no longer any residue of naturalism in Silvia's still lifes. Nature is definitively behind us, we have taken leave of it once and for all as members of a species that has reinvented and redesigned itself almost daily for several millennia. We belong entirely to the furious Promethean and diabolical march of History. Yet, in the moment in which Silvia Stocchetto paints us in the gray mirror of our objects, in that moment the story also ends. The knives are placed in the drawers, the flayed corpse of the chicken lies in a turned off oven, the cauliflower is peeled, the utensils are untouched.

The same goes for the human figure: by painting it, Silvia sucks it into the dead zone of her still lifes. Irene, Luisa, Gianluca, my father, my mother, have already crystallized the moment they enter Stocchetto's pictorial space, they have already passed from the liquid phase of matter, the vital phase, to the solid phase, to an early rigor mortis. Everything in this pictorial universe is painted an instant after the end of the world. Yet there is no desperation, there is no rejection, there is almost no regret. In fact, everything in Silvia Stocchetto's pictorial universe is painted an instant after the end of the world or, if you prefer, in the first instant of creation. You choose, The choice is free, Contrary to what happens in existence, in art the choice between life and death is free, provisional, undecidable. That crucial choice is even reversible. You can pass from the realm of the living to that of the dead and go back to tell the story. Isn't that an amazing gift?

The passable border. The threshold. The low ford. The paintings painted by Silvia place us in this point and this is the gift that comes to us from her painting. It is not simply a matter of still life as a pictorial representation of inanimate subjects. Everything in this painting is disanimated, even the living, even the dearest relatives. But, simultaneously, everything is revived there. Every subject, living, deceased, or never lived, even those yet to come, still uncreated, is granted a second act, a second life in this theater of grays. Everything, every person is attracted by Silvia's mastery on the edge of her story, on the edge of being. Silvia always paints while staying in the customs officers' house, from the rise overlooking the cliff, at the point where you can observe the passage of those who go and those who stay. Her paintings speak here and now with the authority that comes from having been there and then. Every object, every person in them participates simultaneously in the world of the living and that of the dead, in the visible and invisible spheres. Every background is gray but everything is illuminated.

And so, according to what I mentioned at the beginning, to understand the true nature of these ultra-modern still lifes we will have to go back to antiquity. To those asarotos (unswept house) that developed in the Hellenistic era, to those small mosaic decorations on the floors that represented the remains of food: orange peels, grapes, lemon peels. Those first experiments in the history of that genre of painting that we have learned to define as "still life" belonged to a cult of the deceased: the food that fell from the table, decorated in mosaics on the floors, was intended for deceased loved ones, for deceased family members. No tidying up of the room after the banquet, no broom had to sweep it away so that the dead could continue to live in the homes that had already been theirs in life, so that the gap between the visible and the invisible remained open, passable in both directions.

The still lifes live by Silvia Stocchetto serve the same purpose, even for us here, now, at the end of that very long story: they keep the gap open.