KROMYA Art Gallery Verona presents Onirica, a solo exhibition by Edoardo Cialfi, curated by Massimo Mattioli. Bringing together approximately twenty works, the exhibition explores the artist’s ongoing investigation into landscape painting, approached not simply as a representation of reality but as an unstable territory where perception, memory, and vision overlap.

Created primarily using aerosol paint on canvas, and in some cases on panel, the works lead the viewer through a progressive transformation of the image. Landscape is the starting point of Cialfi’s research: at first recognizable through its natural and spatial coordinates, it gradually loses definition, moving towards a rarefied dimension suspended between figuration and abstraction. 

Forms progressively dissolve, while light, color, and atmosphere become structural elements of the composition. Images seem to emerge and withdraw from view at the same time, challenging the possibility of clearly distinguishing what belongs to reality from what belongs to memory, imagination, or dream.

The aerosol technique plays a central role in this process and is an essential component of Edoardo Cialfi’s visual language. The atomization of color allows the artist to construct his images through extremely subtle layers and gradual tonal transitions. More than a technical device, it becomes a means of altering perception: contours soften, distances become uncertain, and the landscape takes on the shifting quality of a vision. 

It is precisely within this suspended territory that the title Onirica finds its meaning. As curator Massimo Mattioli observes, the dream transforms reality and alters its definition. Landscape therefore becomes the site of a precarious perception, where what initially appears real gradually moves away from its objective consistency and acquires the unstable, mutable quality of a dreamed image. 

Cialfi’s painting operates along this threshold: between presence and absence, memory and vision, reality and transfiguration. Landscape is never entirely abandoned, but continuously redefined. It remains a recognizable trace, a point of contact with the visible world that painting subjects to an ongoing process of dissolution and reconstruction.

The scale of the works further contributes to this perceptual experience. Onirica brings together paintings in different formats, including several large-scale works in which the expanded image alters the physical relationship between artwork and viewer. Rather than observing the landscape from a distance, the viewer is progressively drawn into its atmosphere, entering a pictorial dimension that seems to extend beyond the boundaries of the surface. 

Onirica ultimately presents contemporary landscape painting as a mental and perceptual space. Through the gradual rarefaction of the image, Edoardo Cialfi investigates the ways in which we see, remember, and transform the world around us. Painting becomes a territory where reality and dream can coexist, allowing images to emerge as if they belonged simultaneously to the observed world and to the realm of memory.

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue featuring texts by Massimo Mattioli, dedicated to Edoardo Cialfi’s artistic research and the exhibition project. The presentation also extends into KROMYA Art Gallery’s participation in ArtVerona 2026, where the gallery presents a new large-scale pictorial installation by the artist.