Elisa Sighicelli

1968, Turin, Italy

Elisa Sighicelli is an Italian visual artist internationally recognised for her sophisticated research into photography as object and into the very matter of light. After studying in Milan and at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, she developed a language combining photographic image, installation and painting, often playing with three-dimensionality through backlit supports and partially unprinted surfaces.
Her works inhabit the boundary between visible and invisible, between perception and absence. Architectural elements, domestic glimpses, museum interiors and artistic quotations are, through her lens, transformed into suspended, mysterious scenes. Sighicelli explores the evocative power of light, and photography becomes a means of questioning space and time.

Elisa Sighicelli

Untitled (Homage to Beccafumi), backlit photograph on lightbox, 2005
97x57x5 cm

In Untitled (Homage to Beccafumi), Elisa Sighicelli creates a photograph that is at once image and object, evocation and refraction. The work draws on the landscapes of Domenico Beccafumi, master of Sienese Mannerism, reinterpreting his pictorial luminosity in a contemporary key.
The landscape, seemingly classical, is transfigured by a light that comes not from the scene but from the support itself: the lightbox backlights the image, turning it into an almost mystical vision, in which houses, trees and reflections on water seem to surface from memory.
The photograph, in its apparent stillness, comes alive, becoming a floating presence. There is no narrative, only atmosphere. There is no figure, only trace. With this work, Sighicelli celebrates the silent, material power of light, exploring the boundary between image and painting, between representation and perception.
A refined homage to art history, and at the same time a poetic statement on the possibility of reinventing it with contemporary tools.