Art Rotterdam 2026: Silvia Giordani: Night Haze

Introduction

On the occasion of Art Rotterdam 2026, Buysse Gallery presents Night Haze, a focused presentation of new paintings by the Venice based artist Silvia Giordani. Her practice explores landscapes that exist at the threshold between perception and imagination, where geological presence, organic form, and atmospheric space gradually converge.

The following text, written by the artist, accompanies the presentation. Rather than functioning as a descriptive statement, it unfolds as a poetic reflection on the temporal and perceptual conditions that inform the paintings. Through the image of a suspended moment between night and day, Giordani articulates the conceptual space in which her works emerge.

Situated between landscape, abstraction, and symbolic terrain, the paintings invite a slower mode of looking. Within these environments, light, matter, and atmosphere become the primary elements through which the viewer navigates a world in quiet transformation.

Curatorial 

There exists a moment when the world no longer belongs entirely to the night and does not yet belong to the day. A suspended threshold in which the light hesitates and everything seems to hold its breath. It is a fragile, almost imperceptible time, when darkness thins without disappearing and dawn begins to spread like a silent presence.

The paintings on display evoke the experience of a solitary walk in an unfamiliar place, at the edge of daybreak. This is not an abrupt passage, but a slow permeation: the darkness retreating, the light gradually filtering through, the atmosphere shifting even before the eye fully registers it. Night does not vanish; it dissolves into the air, becomes luminous dust, transforms into a veil.

The title Night Haze suggests that night is not a compact substance, but a suspension: a thin mist that envelops things, softens their contours, alters distances. It leaves no tangible residue, but a diffuse vibration, an echo that lingers even as the light begins to make its way forward. The images inhabit that precise point of tension in which light is about to change state, when the air holds both ending and beginning together.

The landscapes are traversable, yet not traceable to any specific place. They seem to belong elsewhere: perhaps to another planet, perhaps to a dream. The transition that runs through them is not only that between night and day; it may also be a passage between different conditions of existence, between what we know and what does not yet have a name.

To move within these works is to follow an implicit direction. Each scene suggests a threshold, a path, a point toward which to tend. Yet the nature of the elements remains ambiguous: minerals that seem animate, crystals of unknown matter, unfamiliar vegetation oscillating between welcome and otherness. These are solitary, arcane, alien yet hospitable places, as though they were awaiting a gaze willing to pass through them.

Here, night is not merely a time of day, but a force that transfigures whatever it touches. It invites us to walk, to pause, to explore what lies beyond the visible surface. Perhaps it is not our night, nor our planet. Perhaps it is a distant elsewhere, or the inner landscape of a dream in which boundaries dissolve.

Night Haze is an invitation to inhabit that threshold: the instant when forms grow uncertain and change is not yet complete. A liminal hour in which the world veils and unveils itself at once, and every step is both exploration and apparition.

_

Text by Silvia Giordani, 2026

Courtesy the artist and Buysse Gallery