Valentina Previtera
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Aug 12
- 6 min read
Working under the name kuro.a.to, Valentina Previtera creates paintings, collages and textile works shaped by the places she’s lived and the materials around her. Trained as an architect, she builds each composition through layering, cutting, and quiet adjustments, letting forms shift and settle in their own time. Circles and grids appear often, not as symbols, but as shapes that have stayed with her since childhood. Her process values imperfection, small accidents, and the freedom of not always needing to explain. Based between Italy and Belgium, she continues to explore how structure and spontaneity can meet through color, fabric and line.
Q: Your materials often depend on where you are. How does your space shape what and how you create?
A: The materials I use are never separate from the spaces I inhabit. They emerge from them, out of practical necessity, cultural context, and an ongoing dialogue with the essence and possibilities of each place. Looking back, I see how deeply these environments, what I came to consider "home", have shaped my artistic journey, influencing not only my physical surroundings but also how I perceive myself within them. They have transformed my relationship with materials, mediums, and the very tools through which I create. For academic and professional reasons, I have moved across several countries in recent years: from Italy to Switzerland, then to Japan, back to Switzerland, and now between Italy and Belgium. Everything began in Japan, where my fascination with textures, patterns, fabrics, paper, and colors became almost uncontrollable. In my 9-square-meter tatami room, I instinctively surrounded myself with textiles and origami paper, materials I didn't yet know how to use, but needed to have around. Switzerland offered more space, and with it, greater creative freedom. I began working with collages, using whatever was on hand: pastels, watercolors, wax crayons.
In Brussels, with the stability of a full apartment, my practice grew in scale and complexity. I introduced canvas painting, embraced oil pastels, and eventually began incorporating textiles. Today, my home is both a living space and a studio, entirely devoted to creating and filled with what I need to bring ideas to life.
Q: What makes you choose paper over fabric, or a stitched surface over paint?
A: I believe every material or format carries a unique creative experience, both for me and for the viewer. Even if my works in collage, painting, or textiles share a common visual language, the process behind each one, and the response it invites, can be profoundly different. When I imagine a new composition, I instinctively ask myself what medium suits it best. The choice often comes quickly, guided by the kind of experience I want to evoke. It depends on the texture and weight of the forms, their tactility, and their scale. The same image, when made in paint, paper, or fabric, will reveal different facets of itself. This decision is also deeply personal. Each technique demands its own rhythm and level of presence. A line drawn with pastel takes on a completely different meaning if it has to be sewn by hand. With collage, forms can be shifted or removed; with painting, every mark is final. In the end, the medium isn’t just a technical decision, it shapes the entire emotional and visual impact of the work. It’s a way of determining how an image should be felt, not just seen.
Q: You keep the errors and imperfections visible. What do they open up for you in the process?
A: As one can clearly see, my works are far from being "perfect." Every element in the composition embodies imperfection: the circles have shaky edges, the lines are uneven, and nothing is entirely precise. For me, this is another way of being free. When I compose an image, I don’t want to be concerned with creating something flawless.
I choose to be vulnerable, honest, and rooted in the present moment. What brings harmony to all this imperfection, however, is color. Without it, these images might simply look like a collection of mistakes. I believe that bold, decisive colors, marked backgrounds, contrasting shapes and lines, give structure and presence to the entire composition. They anchor the work. Error and imperfection belong to a deeply subjective realm, but color does not. Color cannot be a mistake, it resists that notion. It transcends technical flaws and becomes, in many ways, the true protagonist of my work. With some images, I never know what the final result will be. I begin, I add, I adjust, but I can never go back. It’s a process of accepting each mark as it comes and finding a new balance, often by pairing it with another form, until the image finds its own resolution. Rarely I abandon a composition, I always try to make peace with imperfection. Mistakes are what they are, not a flaw to be corrected, but a space of possibility.
Q: Circles and grids return often in your work. What do these forms mean to you?
A: This is a question I’m often asked: why that circle, or that shape? At first, I didn’t think much about it. They were simply forms in space. But over time, I found myself wondering whether they might hold some kind of meaning. Like most adults, I tried to rationalize them, there must be a reason, a concept, a message. Surely they had to "represent" something, a thought, a dream, an idea. As adults, we’ve forgotten how to just be, to exist without always needing explanation. I came to realize that my inability to assign a clear "meaning" to these fascinations was actually the most interesting part. As children, we’re surrounded by things that don’t make sense, and that’s our world. Not understanding something feels natural, we simply accept it. But as adults, everything reverses. We start adding meaning, context, information. We can no longer look at things just as they are. That’s what I find deeply fascinating: the absence of meaning, the innocence, in its truest etymological sense, something born free, untouched by interpretation. I think, unconsciously, these are forms that belong to me in some way. They’re part of a visual language that repeats itself throughout my work. "It doesn’t mean anything" becomes one of adulthood’s most uncomfortable dilemmas. And this is exactly why many adults who engage with my work find this lack of meaning unsettling. "A child could do this" is often said in a dismissive tone, when, in fact, I see it as the highest possible compliment. To create something with the freedom, spontaneity, and purity of a child is something we, as adults, often spend a lifetime trying to unlearn and yet, it may be the most important thing we can hold on to.
Q: What does subtraction mean in your work, and how does it create space for freedom?
A: We’ve just spoken about two fundamental "subtractions" in my work: the act of freeing myself from meaning, and the desire to move away from anything that resembles perfection.
It is an art of subtraction, not only in form, but also in knowledge, information, and learned skill. Each element is deliberately pared back, creating space for subtle shifts in meaning, where silence becomes part of the language and ambiguity invites freedom. In this light, my provocation is neither loud nor confrontational. It is subtle, playful, childlike, suggestive rather than declarative. I aim to shift perception gently, not through resistance, but through quiet disruption. My pieces do not tell stories or impose meaning. Instead, they open space for disenchanted observation, like an adult looking at a child’s drawing, not to decode it, but to absorb its raw, essential presence. In this sense, I see subtraction as the true engine of what you might call "freedom".
Q: How does your architectural training show up in the way you build a composition?
A: I believe that my desire to explore the compositional power of forms in space emerged almost naturally alongside my profession as an architect. Architecture, when truly observed, is a complex and often contradictory art, that carries the responsibility of reflecting the intricacies of real life, rather than simplifying or artificially abstracting them. After all, architecture is another way of giving form to human experience: not merely technical virtuosity, but a drawing that becomes space, an idea that gives shape to emptiness. The placement of objects in space, whether as small as a chair or as large as a building, their volume, proportions, the oddities of certain architectural "puzzles," the emptiness around them, and the tension created between elements, this is my greatest fascination. In this sense, architecture is deeply connected to my artistic practice. While all the architectural principles still linger somewhere in the back of my mind, my artistic path quietly drifts away from that discipline, or perhaps, more timidly, it simply borrows only its most playful parts. To keep my "architect self" separate, I’ve always signed my artworks under the pseudonym "kuro.a.to", a small act of rebellion, perhaps. An attempt to unlearn control and let form exist freely, in its own imperfect logic. Could architecture ever allow for such freedom?
