Prima Vista - Silvia Giordani

Andrea Festa Fine Art is delighted to announce Prima Vista, a solo exhibition of new works by Silvia Giordani, on view from November 22, 2024 to January 15, 2025. The exhibition invites visitors to enter a realm of shifting perception, presenting landscapes that exist at the delicate boundary between the familiar and the unknown.

 

Inspired by a passage from C.S. Lewis’ science fiction novel Out of the Silent Planet, the title Prima Vista refers to the disorienting moment of first encounter with a new world. Giordani harnesses this conceptual lens to investigate how humans interpret the unfamiliar using the language of prior knowledge. In her own words, the work revolves around the “innate impulse to make sense of the unknown through known forms.

Her paintings—rendered in acrylic and oil on canvas—feature ethereal landscapes absent of human presence, yet alive with motion and mystery. Nature in these works takes on strange, fluid geometries, often marked by vivid chromatic breaks. These "portals" or "apertures" serve not only as visual punctuation but also as metaphysical passageways, allowing viewers to imagine other realms beyond what is visible.

Silvia Giordani’s poetics lie in her ability to conjure unfamiliarity out of painterly familiarity. Her imagined geographies beckon us to question how we perceive reality, inviting us to look beyond the surface and ask: What am I really seeing?

 

Through this collection, Giordani composes a visual meditation on vision itself—where looking is not passive, but an act of interpretation and transformation. Prima Vista is a poetic and philosophical journey through landscapes that remain just out of reach, prompting reflection on how we navigate the threshold between the known and the unknowable.