Critical text by
Carmen De Stasio

Daniela Chionna, designer of Francavilla Fontana (Brindisi), examines the slightest nucleus of things, by wrapping them in a light which is a shadow condensation.
In her oleographic constructions, the artist creates some routes which show off the exemplary nature of light beams that evolve from the inside, permeate the surrounding areas and reformulate the visual wave in a restless three-dimension.
The cryptic compositions – installations animated by a conceptualization balanced on empty and full spaces in a changeable harmony on hanging levels – visualize the attraction for the shouting silence, which comes from the darkness through geometries that expand beyond the close form.
Necessary for the development of this kind of artistic expression, in a constant oscillation between painting and sculpture, is the modulation of materials that enlarge, invest the environs, waste their fragmentary nature and formulate a new, exclusive architecture with metaphorical, idiosyncratic and duetting rhythms, in a constant frenzy.
The light and shadow destructuration contributes to create an atmosphere of closeness justified by a synaesthetic richness which allows the installation to be trasformed in a performance of shapes, of projection, of story, in the sequence of magic boxes that intertwine with the surrounding architectures, attributing them a new aspect with dynamic, soft, transparent tones, through techniques of accumulation, salvage and frottage.
Charmed by the possibilities of the light to upset the spaces, Daniela Chionna fixes a versatile synthesis of complex structures deriving from the breaking down of rays which go straight through the material, penetrate the openings and enlarge in deceptive visual games, leaving the definition of the point of view in the mistery. Installations become situations in a constant variability, in search of a measure and of a new balance, where the light seems sumptuous and silent, thick and pinched as the strings of a violin of a bartokian sonata which marks the rebirth, where the man had declared the inability of the material to be used. Therefore, the work represents the central point of attention, with stage effects, symbols of a personal aesthetics and a complicated operation of linguistic sign, that wastes its strictness in the composition of various elements assembled according to the artist’s order, that gives voice to objects wedging them in a space of new generation and that entrusts the breath of an atmosphere where the light defeats the dark silence of the non-thought to the shadow, since the weakness or the value of an object are always in the observer’s perspective.
The sensation received is, in a sense, of a complex unity, where colours lay down carefully on the elements, liven up their action, extol their lost value; they seep into the material, made malleable pliable and creator of shadows that exist because they are overexcited as a presence by a source of internal light.
So, from the hypothesis of the chromatic structure of the light, Daniela goes to build a new narration of the time: her works, peak of a research in the existential substrate in its disparate formulations, recover some lost existential passages and the whirling existential rhythm in a constant innovation; they talk about the urban fabric, they are the condensation of a civilization that keeps its main role, which includes those shelved elements too, invented by the man, that are refused and substituted.
The heart of the town, in the bustrophedic mixture of elements with vivid, fluorescent and visionary shades, is represented by the artist in its completeness and in its movements, she destructures that reality, often shared just in appearance, and she completes it using invisible vital essences, so that each element in its individual identification becomes a memory plug.