Born in 1983 Milan, Italy.

Epiphany of the Wind

Valentina Grilli is an Italian artist, illustrator and teacher. After graduating in art history her path was initially oriented in the field of fashion, working as a textile designer for brands such as Versace and Patrizia Pepe. At the same time, the desire to put talent at the service of a more intimate sphere, painting, germinates: she began as a self-taught painter, first simply with drawing, then with mixed techniques, and finally she came to the world of ancient techniques including oil, tempera egg and finally watercolor. The great receptacle she draws on for her subjects is nature, our most primitive abode, the place where we can regenerate ourselves and discover our true Essence. From her childhood, Valentina has been inspired by animal subjects and from everyday life, she takes spontaneous plants and flowers;but in the last period, Valentina's work has also included trees sketched strictly en plein and re-proposed on canvases or sheets, as archetypes of time and its passage, motionless giants that stand silently against monochrome backgrounds soaked in memory. Since 2021 she also had the great honor to start a collaboration with Raffles Milano, a design university where she teach sketching techniques for communication. In her latest series, the painter is devoting herself to a meditation on the relationship between the wind and trees, and how the former acts on the latter by means of forces that are not explosive, but show their action and strength over time, day after day, year after year. something as invisible as the wind that shapes the tenacity of matter slowly, leaving its imprint, compromising the shape of the trees that become its epiphanies. in this series, sky and earth are united through the action of the wind; in this work, the foliage, bent slightly to one side, is composed of small, intermittent, liquid marks, while the bark, almost a muscle, is treated with more pigment to make the texture more solid. Belonging to the same series, this juniper tree is conceived and realized in a horizontal format in order to best empathize the action of the wind on the tree; found by the artist on a beach on a tiny island in the Mediterranean, it has always been buffeted by the winds from the sea, which have given it this atypical shape. Trees usually soar towards the sky, but here the juniper tree continues in parallel with the earth from which it was born, with its twisted, irregular trunk and the multitude of its small, intertwined branches detailed by the painter, who finds the essence of truth in the details.