Biography
Chiara Smirne was born on 13 July 1980 in Novara, where she lived until she was 25. As a child she showed early on a strong interest for drawing, which brought her to create many characters. The use of colour became an instrument through which she expressed her internal emotional state. She attended an art high school and then the liberal arts college of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, following her equally strong literary interests.
In 2010, her need to express herself through painting re-emerged and she took up her studies again, attending advanced painting courses at NABA Academy in Milan in 2010 and at the Scuola Superiore d’Arte Applicata at Castello Sforzesco in 2011.
Her artistic word aims to explore the surrounding world, reproducing it not as it is, but in a dreamlike and imaginary way, focusing the attention on the emotional side of one or more details: a glance, a light, a billboard, a dark staircase, a neon sign, an empty street. What mainly interests her is bringing impressions, emotions and states of mind to the canvas, those which are connected in particular to the vision of an urban landscape and human figures.
“I mainly paint urban landscapes illuminated mostly by nocturnal lights, crepuscular or unreal, where the human element is there through its obvious absence or with its ‘unexpected’ presence. I try to communicate the presence-absence of man and the context creates a reality where the emotions and sensation dominate. The elements are intensified, creating hallucinations, images in which you must be a spectator without having, at all costs, to find an explanation. I often represent unreal scenes inspired by dreams, memories, thoughts and fears. The unconscious is almost always the true protagonist of my paintings. An unconscious that wants to free itself of its fears and its obsessions, succeeding thus at bringing order and calm where before there was chaos and angst.” (C. Smirne)
