Bio

Silvia Patrono was born in Padua where she currently lives and has her own art studio. Her passion for art began at an early age when she began to paint and study History of Art. After completing a degree in ‘Lettere’ (Humanities) following the historical and artistic curriculum, she enrolled at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Venice to specialise in painting with Professors Carlo Di Raco and Luciano Zarotti.

In 2003, she took part in the temporary exhibition ‘Dreams are not enough’ in Venice, which was followed by numerous exhibitions in Italy. This included a collective exhibition at the Cà Pesaro in 2009, the International Museum of Modern Art in Venice, and abroad, for example in Innsbruck at the Eimladug Contemporary Art Fair in 2008 and in Belgrade, for the event ‘Comunication [sic]’, MKC 2009, at the International Cultural Centre. Among the many exhibitions held in her honour, the 2007 exhibition ‘Sospensioni quotidiane’ (‘Daily Suspensions’) was dedicated to her, and it was held at the Stables of Palazzo Moroni in Padua. In 2013, she was a finalist to be on the front cover of the newspaper ‘Corriere della Sera’.

Silvia Patrono paints large canvases only with oil, a technique that she loves very much for its intensity and because it allows her to dedicate time and space to reflect.
At the beginning of her artistic career, with an original and poetic figurative style, she dedicated her works to female figures in continuous evolution, immersed in another dimension, on two-dimensional backgrounds that were inspired by ancient fabrics, fairy tales and sketched vegetal elements. The ‘Crisalidi’ series was then enriched with evocative elements taken from dreams, which appear in the clothes, in the belts, in the hair, and which link these works to the past, to the stories of knights, to images of the Pre-Raphaelites, and to the romantic women of Symbolist painters. The contrast between the human figure and the decorative backgrounds suspended in time is significant, the former being rendered plastically in an almost statuary way and appearing with a strong presence.

The idea of ​suspension of time and places is represented in the 2006 series ‘Sospensioni’ (‘Suspensions’), where the portraits of women are captured in moments of everyday life, in imaginary living rooms where space is synthesised with geometric scores and evanescent colours, and where absence is the real protagonist.

In 2014, she started pursuing a new style and exploring the representation of nature in her paintings. These appeared as broken and fragmented backgrounds of colour, from which the vitality of the plant elements emerges and in which the chromatic choices follow a rhythm inspired by musical harmonies. The plants of the Crystal Garden of Padua inspire these “natural harmonies”. Soon after, nature is enriched with a wider imaginative background, and the vegetation envelops the female figures, together with representations of animals, until they merge with it.

Silvia Patrono is currently investigating an idea of ​​‘reality’, which is represented as a superimposition of different parallel dimensions. Here, groups of male and female figures appear for the first time; the landscapes are tinged with dark colours and dreams, figures of animals and mysterious geometric objects are revealed, opening windows onto a suspended and surreal world, a dreamlike reality that is perceived in its complexity and stratification. Her characters are unaware interpreters of the invisible in a whirling carousel that preserves images of the past, transfiguring them into contemporary visions.