Francesca Valori, Etre, is an Italian visual artist whose practice develops across photography, digital art, and surrealist and metaphysical visual languages. Her work inhabits a suspended territory between the photographic and the figurative, between conceptual dimension and dreamlike imagery, constructing visual narratives that are essential, silent, and deeply symbolic.
Born in Rome in 1969, she trained in both photography and psychology: she earned a diploma in Photography from the Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome in the early 1990s, and later graduated in Educational Psychology from LUMSA University. These two paths converge in the construction of a hybrid visual language in which perception, memory, identity, and representation coexist in constant dialogue.
Since the mid-1990s, Etre has developed a pioneering research practice in the field of digital experimentation, working at an early stage with the software and visual tools available at the time, exploring photographic manipulation, digital painting, and new visual languages long before their widespread diffusion within the contemporary art scene. Photography continues today to represent the profound matrix of her gaze, influencing the composition, construction of light, and narrative tension of her works.
While working through digital technologies and new media, Etre maintains a rigorous approach to image-making, developing a poetics strongly oriented toward portraiture, the symbolic representation of figures and objects, and still life compositions. Her works are distinguished by suspended atmospheres, silent geometries, and a strong visual intensity, balanced between reality and imagination. Influenced by cinema, fashion, metaphysical painting, and Surrealism, her research explores the relationship between image and perception, presence and absence, memory and mental construction.
Over time, her work progressively incorporates movement and video language, including video art and video photography, further expanding her practice within the field of New Media Art. Her works have been presented through screen-based installations in several cities across Europe, America, and the Middle East, receiving international first prizes and the Gold Medal in the Illustrative Portrait category at the World Photographic Cup (WPC), the most important global competition dedicated to professional photographers, an achievement that earned her a place on the Italian National Photography Team.
Her works have also been published in art yearbooks and included in collections connected to international art publishing. In 2024, her works entered the international auction market, beginning to be listed on platforms such as Artprice, Bidspirit, Arsvalue, and Drouot.
