Dentrocasa | Valentina Diena

Valentina Diena was born in Milan in 1996, and through this interview, we get to know better the developments of her artistic research.

How did she achieve these results?

“What fascinated me first and foremost about drawing with pencils on paper is its presence in our collective memory: all of us started, somewhere in our childhood, picking up colored pencils and making marks on a sheet of paper. All of this while trying to reconstruct our home, the trees in our garden, the figures of our parents and our pets. We have drawn to find our place in the reality around us, to decipher it, and to communicate it to others.

I believe that a part of me still retains those childhood needs: drawing has always represented a fundamental means of communication for me, irreplaceable by verbal language, especially in relation to the observation and processing of what surrounds me. Probably, unlike those who, following their development, abandoned drawing in favor of alternative expressive modes, I have instead maintained the same language and have tried to refine it more and more: the representation of what I draw must be increasingly faithful, increasingly detailed, and indistinguishable from the reality to which it refers.

This is where my love for hyperrealism comes from. I do not find it coincidental, in this sense, that my exclusive interest lies in the representation of objects, often everyday or consumable items; in my work, there are never human faces, portraits, or living figures.

My works are often identified as pop for this reason. In reality, in the era I live in (in which we all live), I strongly believe in the power of objects, particularly in their ability to represent us much more than a human portrait could do: objects and their images are often considered secondary elements, yet they are everywhere around us, they characterize us, they identify us, they trace our path, and they are imbued with the value we assign to them.”