Between what exists and what we imagine lies a territory without rules. This is where Etre creates her universe: images, portraits, still lifes, and suspended scenes, where Surrealism, Metaphysical Art, and Art Deco meet technology, light, and colour. A visual world shaped by atmosphere, symbols, and details, where reality is transformed, colour becomes emotion, and the image becomes an inner space.
Francesca Etre Valori, known artistically as Etre, is an Italian photographer and digital artist. Her artistic journey began at a very young age with photography, which continues to influence her vision and visual language, and which later evolved through figurative digital painting and video art.
She is the daughter of architect and urban planner Michele Valori, a prominent figure in Italian post-war architectural Neorealism, whose archive is preserved at the MAXXI Museum and protected by the Archival and Bibliographic Superintendency of Lazio. She is the niece of actors Bice Valori and Paolo Panelli, writer and journalist Aldo Valori, who directed the Roman office of Corriere della sera, and writer Etre Maria Rontini. She inherited the name Etre from her grandmother, traditionally given within the family to the third of three daughters; Francesca, too, is the third of three sisters. Etre is her middle name and the signature under which she presents her artistic work.
Growing up in a family environment immersed in art, architecture, literature, cinema and theatre, she developed from an early age a deep relationship with images and the world of art.
It was in the early 1970s, when, at the age of eight, her father gave her a Polaroid camera. It was her first encounter with photography and the beginning of a creative journey destined to evolve over time. In the early 1990s, she graduated in Photography from the European Institute of Design (IED) in Rome, at a time when photography was still predominantly analogue and printing was carried out in the darkroom. Her work developed through travel reportage, portraiture and still life. At the age of just twenty, she held a solo black-and-white exhibition dedicated to the eyes of people she encountered during her travels, with an attentive, almost anthropological gaze towards people, places and cultures. She received recognition in international competitions, including an award that gave her the opportunity to undertake an internship at Superstudio 13 in Milan, one of the leading European centers for photography and visual production.
This experience contributed to the development of her visual language, and her research gradually expanded beyond traditional photography. Today it embraces new technologies, keeping pace with the times through the use of new software and maintaining a constant dialogue between photography and contemporary visual languages.
A body of work that explores the space between reality, dreams and imagination, where images, figures and objects become elements of a silent and symbolic narrative. Surrealism, Metaphysical Art and Art Deco aesthetics are reinterpreted through a contemporary sensibility.
Her academic education at the Faculty of Education Sciences of LUMSA University, with a thesis in Psychology, contributes to the introspective dimension of her research. Etre conceives of the image as a space of transformation: a possible, mental and poetic reality, in which real and imaginary elements coexist. Her works have been exhibited and published around the world and are present in the art market through platforms including Artprice and ArsValue. She has exhibited in America, Europe and the Middle East, participating in exhibitions and publications featured in numerous catalogues.
In 2023, she received the Gold Medal in the Illustrative Portrait category at the World Photographic Cup, an international competition open exclusively to professional photographers, thus representing the Italian team around the world. The winning work, a photograph she created and subsequently digitally manipulated, perfectly represents the meeting point between her photographic training and her current practice in digital art.
