I walk and hear the rustle of my footsteps, the scent of damp earth, the glow of light like a sharp blade. I breathe and feel close to the earth, to water, to wind, to fire. I breathe and feel close to myself.
I bend down and pass through the bushes, I rise and look up, I see a light so strong it tears through the veil separating earth from sky. The knots of the tangled branches remind me of the knots of the soul; sometimes they seem impossible to untangle, then suddenly everything opens up unexpectedly. Light is everywhere. It falls like drops on the water, it rests like a reflection on the leaves, it shines like hope on the horizon.
— Claudia Chianese

Claudia Chianese’s forest is made of matter and vision, of scents, sounds, trees, leaves, earth—and of dreams, of shadows and flashes of light. A walk becomes a metaphor for a path of rebirth and regeneration, where the real and the ideal merge through sensory experience and emotional and mental tension. A series of black and white shots narrate this journey deep into the forest, an ascent toward the sky, eyes reaching through the gaps in the foliage, opening passages in the tangle of branches to find the light once more.

The photographs—natural landscapes and close-ups of plants, branches, reflections on water or shadows on the ground—are refined and complex images, where blacks and whites unfold in a myriad of tones through blurring and soft focus. These photos are tactile, almost like embroidery or ink and watercolor drawings. A full moon, a ring of light in the dark backdrop of the cosmos, opens and closes the journey, where the perfect circle comes full and everything returns.

The Lichtung, in Heideggerian memory, is man's emergence into the sudden, blinding light of a clearing after walking through the forest’s shadows: the place where Being reveals itself in its truth. In the dialectic of opposites that weaves through Claudia Chianese’s language—weight and lightness, matter and idea—merge to give form to a fragile and precious balance between wood and gold, body and mind, shadow and light.
— Brunella Buscicchio