Technique: Airbrush

There are tools that are born for precision and end up telling stories of the undefined. The airbrush—a tiny device invented in the late 19th century to atomize color—is one of them. Seemingly technical, almost surgical, in the right hands it becomes a lyrical instrument, capable of evoking rather than defining. Chiara Del Vecchio has chosen it as the natural extension of her visual thought: after years of study, practice, and listening to the material, she has made it the voice of her poetics.

The surface of her canvases—vast, ethereal, immersed in an atmosphere of suspension—becomes a field of elusive apparitions. The faces, bodies, and presences that emerge from her soft sprayings do not impose themselves, do not declare. They appear, dissolve, and watch us as we watch them. These are images out of focus—not by imperfection, but by intention. They challenge our habit of wanting everything sharp, everything readable, everything under control. Instead, they compel us to slow down, to engage our memory, to filter what we see through personal experience.

Behind each canvas lies a long, rigorous, and deeply meditative process. Every work begins with a phase of photographic research, during which the artist selects images, fragments, atmospheres. From this visual material, a preparatory drawing in pencil and graphite is born: a silent, often meticulous map that forms the structural backbone of the piece. These drawings—delicate yet intense—already contain, in essence, everything that will emerge—and simultaneously, everything that will be veiled.

Upon this foundation begins a true stratification, a construction made of veils. Layer upon layer, the drawing is progressively covered by a chromatic mist—successive passes of acrylic paint applied with the airbrush. Each pass softens contours, dissolves certainty, transforms form into atmosphere. It is a process of subtraction, but also of revelation: as details fade, suggestion intensifies. The original graphic trace never fully disappears—it remains beneath, silent, like a presence vibrating through the color.

“Nothing is permanent,” the artist states. “Life transforms, and with it, our perception of reality.” Her paintings thus become sensitive studies on transience, on matter that crumbles, on form that transforms. But also—and perhaps above all—on identity. In a world that demands we be defined, categorized, instantly recognizable, Chiara Del Vecchio offers another possibility: that of being, at last, blurred.

Her figures speak of us more than they appear to. Not because they are faithful portraits, but because they reach that deep place where memories, absences, and unnamed emotions dwell. Every face that emerges from her surfaces is also our own—the one we have forgotten, the one we have hidden, the one we recognize without knowing from where it comes.

BIO

Chiara Del Vecchio’s large-scale canvases, created with airbrushed acrylic, inhabit an ethereal, out-of-focus dimension that invites the viewer into a suspended world—on the threshold between the visible and the invisible. Her technical choice is anything but incidental; it is a deeply conceptual act: “I use this approach to give form to impermanence,” the artist explains. “Everything changes, transforms—just like the reality around us. The only thing that remains, that truly defines us, is the sum of our lived experiences.”

Her paintings thus become sensitive explorations of perception, forming the starting point for an intimate dialogue with the viewer. “I want the image to be experienced, not merely observed,” Del Vecchio says. “To be crossed through a personal process of identification, generating a meaning that is open, not fixed—ever-changing and profoundly individual.”

Her practice unfolds within a space of quiet mystery—between what is said and what is left unsaid, between the known and the unknown. Between being and not being.

The relationship between artwork and viewer thus transforms into a silent dance: no longer passive observation, but subtle dialogue. The work activates within our mind, becoming personal, mutable, infinite. Like in a dream, no definitive truth is given—only an open space in which to search for it. Chiara Del Vecchio does not paint to show, but to suggest. She does not construct images, but atmospheres. And within them, she invites us to find ourselves.

Her work gracefully inhabits that fascinating limbo between being and not being, between the visible and the invisible. Each canvas is a threshold, each figure an enigma. And yet, within this mystery, there is something profoundly human, something close. It is painting that breathes, that moves, that welcomes. Painting that, paradoxically, through blurring, gives back the clarity of feeling.

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