Fly Drawing

Chiara Arsego was born in Montecchio Maggiore, Vicenza, Italy in 1979. She began her artistic studies in Italy, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna in 1999. The harmony of nature and the dynamism of the human body were at the heart of her artistic research during her academic studing. She honed her eye through contact with the great masters of painting from the 16th to the 9th century, Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Ingres, and developed a refined taste for figurative painting and the anatomy of the human body. She exhibited for the first time in 2002 at the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Bologna, then in Rome, Paris, and Berlin. Curious by nature, Chiara experiments with numerous techniques: engraving, acrylic on canvas and paper, watercolor, Indian ink, charcoal drawing, red chalk, and mixed media, eventually deepening her exploration with large-format oil paintings, her favorite technique. Over the years, she has developed a personal universe between reality and imagination, blending emotions and memories, sometimes straying into mysterious lands, where the conflicting relationship between human beings and nature gives way to a new, dreamlike symbiosis, a harmonious dialogue between humans and other living species. In 2008, she moved to Paris and began working in children's illustration. She has exhibited her work in France and other countries and published 23 children's picture books in France, Belgium, Germany, Canada, Italy, and Colombia, while participating in numerous literary exhibitions in France and Switzerland. She has also won literary prizes, such as the 2011 Chronos Vacances Prize and the 2012 Incorruptibles Prize. Since 2019, she has returned to large-scale painting and has participated in numerous contemporary art exhibitions in France and Italy. Her artistic research now focuses on large-scale oil painting, a work closely connected to the contemporary art scene. She continues to explore human nature and its contradictions, in a poetic and profound universe, where narrative and dreamlike feelings intertwine. The delicate relationship between man and nature remains at the heart of her work, as does the questioning of the external conditioning of the human mind in its perception of the world. Chiara's pictorial universe takes us into a world where human beings find their rightful place in a euphony of different species that coexist in harmonious balance and share the same vital energy.