Etre is an Italian visual artist working across photography, digital construction, and video art.
Her practice transforms the image into a perceptual system rooted in the traditions of Surrealism and Metaphysical art.
Portraiture, constructed scenes, and still life define a visual language based on symbolic and suspended compositions, in which figures, objects, and space become elements of an open, evocative, and deliberately ambiguous narrative, marked by a subtle psychological tension.
Francesca Valori (Etre) is an Italian visual artist working at the intersection of photography, digital construction, and moving image. Her practice dismantles the documentary function of photography and reconstructs it as a controlled psychological space in which the image becomes fiction, architecture, and thought.
Formed in educational psychology at LUMSA University and holding a diploma in Photography from the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED) in Rome.
Rooted in the traditions of Surrealism and Metaphysical Art, yet firmly contemporary in language, her work stages carefully constructed visual environments in which figures, objects, and space are stripped of narrative excess and reduced to symbolic tension. Each composition functions as a suspended system of meaning—precise, silent, and intentionally unresolved.
Her imagery is defined by rigorous formal control that combines cinematic sensibility, fashion-influenced aesthetics, and minimal composition. Within these constructed spaces, presence is unstable: bodies emerge as psychological markers rather than subjects, while environments operate as mental projections rather than physical locations.
Working across photography, digital manipulation, and digital painting, Valori treats the image as a site of transformation rather than representation. Her practice extends the photographic medium into a post-photographic condition in which reality is no longer recorded but constructed.
Active since the 1990s, she anticipated key developments in digital and post-digital image-making, positioning her practice within the broader discourse of New Media Art while maintaining a rigorous authorial and formal control.
Her work has been exhibited and published internationally and is present in the global art market through platforms such as Artprice and Arsvalue. She received the Gold Medal in the Illustrative Portrait category at the World Photographic Cup, representing Italy on the international stage.
