Anonymous

A face. A neutral background. No set design, no context. Just the gaze—direct, silent, precise. The portraits in Chiara Del Vecchio’s collection evoke the aesthetics of an ID photo, but radically subvert its meaning. These are not documents. They are testimonies. They do not archive identity: they set it free.

We live immersed in a system that translates us into numbers—codes, passwords, PINs, accounts, followers, statistics. Each person carries a digital kit, like a second invisible skin that precedes us and represents us long before our face does. In this hyperconnected and overexposed world, identity risks becoming an algorithm, a field to fill in, a piece of data to be stored. And yet, behind every tax ID, every identity card, every social profile, there is still someone who feels, remembers, imagines. Someone who exists.

With this series of works, Chiara Del Vecchio addresses the theme of dehumanization through a pictorial gesture that is both conceptual and poetic. The subjects—men and women of various ethnicities and backgrounds—are portrayed frontally, with the formal restraint of an identification photo. The background is uniform, neutral, almost bureaucratic. And yet, in the absence of context, something emerges with intensity: the gaze. The gaze as an act of presence, a silent resistance against conformity. Through this contrast, Del Vecchio restores value to what makes us unique: memory, experience, emotional complexity. Her figures are not mannequins, as the French word might suggest, but people. They carry fragments of untold stories, of journeys, of crossings, of waiting. Some resemble migrants, others global citizens, others still are simply witnesses of the present moment. But in each of them, Chiara Del Vecchio captures something irreducible: a color, a nuance in the gaze, a trace of the soul that no code could ever replicate.

Her brushwork—measured, blended, almost photographic—is charged with symbolic tension: reclaiming identity through art. A reminder that, even in the age of data and artificial intelligence, true uniqueness remains unrepeatable—because it is made of lived experience, desire, and dreams. Anonymous is an act of awareness. A visual reflection on the vulnerability and dignity of the human being in the age of depersonalization. But it is also an invitation: to look beyond the label, to reconstruct the deeper meaning of existing in the world. Because every face tells a story that deserves to be heard.