CHEMIGRAMS

Margherita Chiarva’s artistic exploration takes off from old photographic techniques, reworked to create visions going beyond mere representations of reality.

The Chemigrams series is the result of the artist’s pondering the theme of play and children’s imagination. Growing up, these aspects fade into the background but are replaced by daydreams leading to the same kind of emotional experience. So the series is intended to be a metaphor for the artist’s daydreams and to render visible what never really existed.

To achieve this Margherita Chiarva did not use traditional photographic techniques but instead created images in full light, using shadows and above all chemical treatment of the paper’s surface to “write” the images on the Polaroid prints. This process makes each work unique, an original that not even the artist could ever replicate, because no negatives of the photographs exist.

Thanks to this technique the photos in the series are nearly abstract and suggest a variety of memories and fantasies, working on the observer’s subconscious and imagination.