La Luna Rubata (2007) Painting by Chiara Machetti

Almost like in a poetic song, poured out by sweet, warm colors that appear almost possessed by delicate and at the same time spicy scents of amber and myrrh. This is how the immediate pictorial and multi-material art of CHIARA MACHETTI presents itself to us..
The objective rendering of her art is mature (even if it is good to remember that we are talking about a self-taught painter) and coincides with her biological age, born in Tripoli on 28/10/1961. But it is precisely her expressive choice that characterizes her for that desired reference to a fairy-tale time, passed by all of us, but never forgotten.
Her way of giving herself to us recalls in some ways the symbolist painting of Henri Rousseau, look, for example, at the painting entitled "The Sleeping Gypsy" and compare it to Machetti's painting "The Turning Point" , but still Rousseau-like is the continuous use of earth or that subtle representation of the moon and the sun. Stars certainly passing by, but in the artist they seem to represent more as something to be grasped to enjoy them better or fully, perhaps as in the past, when younger she could plough through the nights and mornings in lightheartedness and colors
and in that time as if slowed down, of a distant land like her Libya. So her works are full of both reverberations, but also of silent desires perhaps not sufficiently or completely satisfied. But I do not believe that they want to express a feeling of selfishness, but rather a way to preserve the things she loved, lived and seen, to give them to those dear to her. The element, but certainly not the only one, is made up of material ranges of silver or gold thread that thus form a clever canvas that is a thick and modulated net that, from time to time, encloses, underlines, and loads with emphasis the expressive situations.
Look at the splendid "Enchanted Village", charged with an almost unreal physicality, mediated by a modulated desire for a golden net that almost acts as a boundary wall to a frightened, but full and warm at the same time, citadel, almost reminiscent of the outcomes of a Signorellian city.
Then the net is constant that insinuates itself everywhere: whether on the face of a woman almost to constitute the smallest burqa, or a net that envelops, protects a female nude expertly painted in all its anatomical details, playing with an ambivalent balance given by the wavy red hair that also seem to act as a material network.
There are works that leave a suspended feeling of sweetness, candor, see for example "Abbracciata alla Luna". The protagonist is the artist herself, but we could all be leaning on the Muse of our much desired and still never achieved nocturnal thoughts and desires.

VALERIA S.LOMBARDI
Doctor in Contemporary Art History
graduated at the State University of Milan



Chiara Machetti was born in Tripoli (Libya) on October 28, 1961. She lived here until the age of nine. Her homeland will influence many of her works...

• Nationality: ITALY
• Date of birth : 1961
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary Italian Artists