Some places aren't just visited — they visit us. Paris touched Gianella Riephoff with
invisible fingers, delicate and sure, like someone awakening an ancient secret within the
soul. It was there, between the golden reflections of Versailles and the liquid nights
along the Seine, that her flowers, previously silent, wanted to speak. Although known for
her intense abstractions, Gianella always painted flowers — but in silence, like someone
writing letters they never send. They were born when the world demanded a pause,
when the gesture needed to breathe. Painting flowers was a refuge, a silence just her
own. In Paris, however, these flowers asked for light.
Born under a Uruguayan sky, with roots deeply rooted in Brazilian exuberance, in
Florianópolis - Santa Catarina, her art is the reflection of a personal and artistic journey
woven with threads of memory, the primal force of nature, and a freedom that overflows
in every brushstroke.
Throughout her career, Gianella always painted without sketches — free gestures,
acrylic paint on canvas, intuitive layers like emotional landscapes. But it was in Paris
that a new sigh crept into her palette: the lightness of watercolor. A technique rare in
her repertoire, used now like someone taking a deep breath and letting go. Inspired not
by visits, but by Monet's sensitive vibe, she approached flowers not as form, but as
presence.
Versailles was not just an image, it was a golden breath. The meticulously designed
gardens touched her gaze without demanding obedience: they left space for the
unexpected — a scent, a fallen petal, a color that escaped — to settle in. "The flowers
painted me," she said. And that sentence contains the entire surrender of her
experience.
The Eiffel Tower, in turn, did not impose itself as a monument, but as a metaphor.
Gianella saw it as iron lace against the sky, a structure that vibrates, that floats. On the
canvas, it doesn't appear as a tourist symbol, but as an emotional state: light,
suspended, almost a whisper of steel and light.
What Gianella brought back from Paris doesn't fit in a suitcase. And perhaps not even in
words. What settled upon her was more subtle: sensations, silences, internal gestures.
Her painting now carries seeds — small visual particles of what is yet to come. Because
she knows: images aren't harvested immediately. They germinate.
In each layered color, in each transparency left by the watercolor, there is an invitation to
contemplation. Not to understand, but to feel. Gianella doesn't offer us answers: she offers
atmospheres. And her Paris — not the postcard one, but the one between the lines — pulses in
her works like a perfume that lingers on the skin even after a farewell.