Christiana Visentin Gajoni

**Christiana Visentin Gajoni** (also known as **Cristiana Gajoni**; born in 1974 in Rome (Italy) is a painter and actress Italian. Naturalized French citizen, lives and works permanently in Paris.

## Life

Cristiana Gajoni, is the daughter of actress Cristina Gajoni and composer Alberto Visentin.
She started painting as a child in her grandfather's studio Adriano Gajoni, with his grandfather's pupils in Milan, who after his death had taken over the workshop. His pictorial movement is called Magical Neorealism. Educated at the Montparnasse Academy in Paris.
Initially, specialized in the study of artistic genres of Still life, mainly pictorial which represents inanimate elements (fruits, flowers, various objects...) and drawing inspiration from the Renaissance Art painters she studied for decades. She started her career as a very young actress de cinéma, moved to Paris to study drawing and painting at the Académie Montparnasse in Paris then devoted himself to painting.

Cristiana Gajoni has established her atelier in Vétheuil, directly overlooking the fields of sunflowers once painted by Claude Monet.

## Style

Christiana Visentin Gajoni creates a genre of painting in which objects are represented with extreme neonaturalism, but which, thanks to the addition of surreal or paradoxical elements, give the representation a subtly mysterious effect, conveying a sense of unreality.

## Artistic award

- Salon d'Automne at Grand Palais of Paris
- 30 million friends at Paris, TF1 television show, 1st prize for painting Enfant prodige

## Critical analysis

The work of Christiana Gajoni stands as one of the most coherent and philosophically dense contributions within the contemporary European pictorial landscape. Her development of _Magical Neorealism_ is not a mere synthesis between mimesis and imagination, but is grounded in a specific ontological stance: painting as an interrogative act directed toward the visible, the body, and the threshold between phenomenon and enigma. In this sense, the image does not exhaust itself in representation, but becomes a field of tension between apparent reality and invisible depth.

Through a technique rooted in hyperrealism, inherited from the Lombard school and reworked during her Parisian training, Visentin Gajoni constructs surfaces where reality is meticulously reproduced only to be subtracted from its descriptive function. Objects, animals, and human figures—often set against gold backgrounds that negate perspective—become signs saturated with ambiguity. Painting becomes a symbolic device, and each work is structured as a dual-level construct: compositional rigor and semantic disruption.

She manifests a phenomenology of ambivalence: the flesh is both substance and metaphor, the object is both relic and trauma, space is both temporal suspension and ritual field. In this perspective, the pictorial image becomes a theater of the invisible, where subjectivity does not express itself but disintegrates—sometimes surfacing as faces engraved in matter, or figures traversed by silent memories.

In her most conceptual outcomes, Visentin Gajoni addresses the iconography of trauma with a language of utmost sobriety and power. The enigma condenses in subtraction: childhood, revelation, and death are not represented but evoked through a grammar of absence and silence. Identity—like the image—is never fully given, but exposed as expectation, latency, semantic stratification.

On the theoretical level, her research intersects with phenomenological aesthetics (see Merleau-Ponty), image semiotics (see Georges Didi-Huberman), ontology of the body (see Jean-Luc Nancy), and the poetics of _reverie_ (see Gaston Bachelard). But it is above all in the full assumption of painting as a place of truth, beyond the representative function, that Visentin Gajoni articulates a genuinely philosophical voice. In an age dominated by visual overproduction and the aesthetics of immediacy, her work reaffirms painting as threshold, as revelatory act, as active form of thought.

## Art exhibition

- 2002
    - _"Soirée Futuriste"_, exhibition of theatrical caricatures in Reims, Paris, Lyon, Naples.
- 2001
    - _"expo CHRISTIANA"_, Espace Château-Landon.
- 1999
    - _"D'un Autre Côté"_, Espace Château-Landon.
- 1998
    - _"CHRISTIANA"_, Espace Arts Lebaudy
    - "Art Kanal 10", Portes Ouvertes
- 1994
    - _Bacchus, Nymphes et Satyres_, Crypte de "La Taverne", Bordeaux
    - "Spyrales", Club de la Presse. International Association of Press Clubs, Bordeaux
- 1991
    - Studio Tamaso, Milano
    - Villa Litta Carini, Bergamo
- 1989
    - Group exhibition at the Salon d'Art of the city of Clairac
    - _"Exposition Salon d'Automne"_, Grand Palais, 3rd Prize with _Les Deux Miroirs_
- 1985
    - _"Les Peintres du spectacle"_, exhibition at the Maison de la Radio (Paris)
- 1981
    - _"30 millions d'amis"_, children’s group exhibition for the television show (1st Prize, _Peindre Son Chat_)
- 1979
    - Group exhibition of idealised paintings by children on Saint Francis of Assisi in the cloister of the Basilica of Santi Cosma e Damiano

## Related pages

- List of Italian painters
- Adriano Gajoni
- Alberto Visentin

## Infobox (person)

- **name**: Cristiana Gajoni
- **caption**: Christiana Visentin Gajoni dans son atelier parisien
- **birth name**: Christiana Visentin
- **birth date**: 1974
- **birth place**: Rome, Italy
- **nationality**: Italian
- **education**: Académie de la Grande Chaumière
- **occupation**: artist