Silvio Giannini (b. 1998, Rome, Italy) is an Italian visual artist who currently lives and works in Rome. After graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, he worked as Marco Tirelli’s assistant at the Ex Pastificio Cerere. Since 2024, he has participated in major Italian awards and competitions, including the Premio Nocivelli, Premio UAART, Premio Arte (Museo della Permanente, Milan) and Immagina Mag (MAXXI, Rome). In 2025, he won the 5th edition of the Whatsart competition. His solo exhibitions include La prima notte di quiete, Studio Orma, Rome, 2025, and Sarà ancora luce altrove, Galleria La Fonderia, Florence, 2025.
Silvio Giannini’s practice unfolds within the uncertain territory where memory, perception and vision converge. Through the gradual layering of acrylic, gouache and charcoal, applied to paper in thin glazes, the artist constructs suspended images in which the landscape loses any descriptive quality and is transformed into a mental space.
In the works presented at ReA Art Fair 2026, a pared-back natural landscape coexists with geometric forms of absolute white. These are not painted surfaces, but sections of paper left untouched: absences of pigment that interrupt the continuity of the image and introduce a rupture into the act of seeing. These voids belong neither to architecture nor to the natural landscape. They are silent presences that subtract rather than add, making it impossible to determine whether we are looking at a memory, a vision or a real place.
Ambiguity becomes the central focus of the work. Nature retains the reassuring quality of a familiar image, yet it is traversed by elements that undermine its stability, evoking the way memory operates: selecting, erasing and leaving gaps. These white surfaces might be thresholds, absences or fragments of a memory that the mind is unable – or perhaps unwilling – to reconstruct.
Rather than representing a place, Giannini makes the process of remembering visible: every image remains inevitably incomplete, and every void becomes a space open to the viewer’s projections.
Text by Valeria Conti