Vladimiro & Chiara: Art & Love

One the events of the on-going poetry festival (15-31 May 2026) in Schio called Semenze Matte (“Mad seedlings”) is an exhibition titled “Come Un Foglio di Carta” (Like a Sheet of Paper). The on-going exhibition at Palazzo Toaldi Capra in Schio’s city-centre has drawings and prints of the artist Maria Chiara Toni.

At this exhibition I met Vladimiro Elvieri (1950), an artist engraver and companion of Maria Chaira Toni (1950-2025). Vladimiro told me that Chiara, the love of his life for about 47 years, had passed away last year. I spoke to him about their personal and artistic journeys. As we talked, it was clear that speaking about losing Chiara still moved him and made him emotional.

While we talked about their life-stories, it seemed that they had led an active and interesting life, and talking about that would require some more time. Thus, I am planning to meet Vladimiro again, to talk about their artistic experiences about engraving. This first post presents an edited version of our talk on 17 May 2026.

The few art-works presented with this post are by Maria Chaira Toni (click on the images for a bigger view) 

A Conversation with Vladimiro Eliveri 

Sunil: Vladimiro, can we start with your name? This is not a common name in Italy, it sounds more an Eastern European or Russian name.

Vladimiro: It was the name of my uncle, my mother’s brother, he had died in the war and my mother wanted to remember him, that is how I got it. The men in my family, my grandfather and uncle, tended towards the political ideas of Russia of that period, if that had any influence, I don’t know.

Sunil: Tell me about your early life.

Vladimiro: I was born in Schio. My initial education was also in Schio and then I went to the Art Institute of Nove (Bassano). I was married and living in Schio, when in 1978 I met Chiara. It was like being struck by lightening. She was originally from Mantova but was living in Cremona, after 7 months I left Schio and went to live with her. She was working in house furniture sector, and at the same time, she was an artist, designing and painting. I shifted to her studio and that became our home.

Cremona became our base, we were together for forty six and a half year and travelled to different parts of the world as artists. As artists we worked together, discussing every day, we both grew as artists through this interaction, without overpowering the other person. We respected each other as an artist. We had very strong emotional connection with each other and that helped our relationship.

Sunil: Talk to me about your own artistic journey, how did it start?

Vladimiro: My artistic journey started in the nursery school. That was when my first art exhibition was held. I was 4 or 5, I asked myself why I had so many papers full of art, but other children didn’t have them. A nun who came to our school, she said that my designs were beautiful and full of colours. Actually, I was born with the bug of art, and it was the same for Chiara. Art helped us to express our inner liberty through the art.

After 5 years at the Art Institute in Nove, I also went to Paris for some time. Initially, I did a lot of different works to make a living, while making art was in the free time. Most of those works were related to arts and graphics, including making small sculptures, working with silver, and doing stone-cutting.

In 1975, I became an engraver and started making art-incisions when I was working at Torchio-Thiene (a printing press famous for printing of contemporary art) of Armando Martini, who was using different techniques of calcography (Copperplate printing). We became friends. He was printer and also an experimenter of different techniques with new materials. I was putting into practice his inventions as an artist-engraver. I worked with him for 4 years and that had a determining impact on me. With him, I learned how to use the torque for printing. The things I learned with Armando, were useful for me to work as engraver in making incisions in Cremona.

Armando believed in teaching others and I learned this from him. Both, I and Chiara, we also took an active role in teaching young persons about incision-art.

I have about 830 incisions, in different sizes and shapes, some huge ones, some composed of many sheets, some using new techniques, etc. Chiara had made around 320 incisions. Along with incisions, the second artist area of our work is design. Chiara also painted.

Sunil: When you made incisions, were these accompanied by prints?

Vladimiro: Yes of course, for that you need a good printer who understands art. If artists themselves know how to print, it gives them the freedom to decide the kind of results they want from the printing. If an artist who makes incisions, also makes his own prints, it help him in becoming a better incisor. There are many techniques even in printing from incisions, for example, it can be in black and white or it can be in colours. In the recent exhibition of Chiara in Cremona, we had a few colour prints of her work.

Chiara mostly did incisions and paintings, while I also did light-painting, light-design and graphite on Cibachrome (drawing with graphite pencil on photographic-print). I did this because I wanted to interpret the writings of a Polish writer and playwright named Witold Gombrowicz (1904–1969), with whom I felt a deep connection in terms of his essence and thinking. In 1996, I decided to make a series of artworks, a few incisions, mostly light-design, and a few graphite on Cibachrome, around 28 artworks all together, to reinterpret his writings and his themes. I didn’t want to illustrate his words but rather to re-interpret them through my art.

French-American visual artist Man Ray (1890-1976), who was active in Dada and Surrealist movements, had already experimented with light-designs, using a torch-light in the dark, calling them Photograms and Rayographs. In 1949, Pablo Picasso had also collaborated with photographer Gjon Mili to make “light drawings” by making ephemeral figures in the air and fixing them on the film.

For my artworks on the writings of Witold Gombrowicz, I did another variation of this technique. I made light-designs, printed them on Cibachrome and then worked with graphite-tips, so as to bring out the white underneath the black surface. This double work was extraordinary – first there was the light-design, which had movement in the air without a specific or precise idea, it started as a sapling that grew out of me through my gestures in the air. The second part of working on the Cibachrome was more guided, trying to identify the forms hidden inside the light-design, by scratching on the dark surface and bringing out the white lines.

For example, this work called "Cosmo" was based on the title of one of his novels (shows a picture in a catalogue). Once I completed this series, I told about it Francesco Cataluccio (Italian expert of Polish literature for the publisher Feltrinelli, who had curated the publishing of works of Witold Gombrowicz in Italy) and he suggested that I write to the organisers of a festival about Gombrowicz in Poland.

Thus, an exhibition of these works was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Radom. It was wonderful because it allowed me and Chiara to participate in that festival, which had theatre groups from different parts of the world to stage his plays. We met many of the persons about whim he had written in his books, it was like a dream for us. For example, there was Alejandro Russovich, the Argentinian philosopher with whom Gombrowicz had lived for 4 years, along with Gombrowicz's wife Rita and many others.

Sunil: Did you travel to other countries with your art?

Vladimiro: With our incisions, we travelled to many art biennale around the world. That was an opportunity to see what others were doing in their countries. Since there were not so many persons in Italy working on incisions, we could exchange experiences at international level.

That helped us to start an Art Biennale in Cremona focusing on incision-art, which was held for 20 years, from 1999 till 2019. Each biennale had 3-4 sections such as guest country, invited international artists, young Italian incision-artists, ex-libris (bookplates) and historical section. Through these, Cremona museum received in gift about 2000 artworks, which is an extraordinary art collection of the best art-incisors from different parts of the world. Some influential persons from the art-world ignored us, others supported us and it was a successful initiative.

An important journey for us when we went to atelier of Henry Goetz (1909-1989) in Paris in 1979. He was a surrealism painter and engraver, a friend of Mirò. While I was working with Martini in Thiene, we had used an engraving technique invented by Goetz but we had modified it, by changing the materials which resulted in more interesting results. I took the prints of those experiments to Goetz in Paris. I was a little apprehensive that he may not like that we have modified his technique, instead he was happy about it. He became a friend.

Another important relationship was with the art-philosopher Dino Formaggio (1914-2008). We met in 1995 and at that time he was already old, but we became good friends and we had very interesting discussions that helped us to grow culturally.

Sunil: So for all this time you were in Cremona, when did you come back to Schio?

Vladimiro: Chiara had retired from her furniture work in 2019. In 2021, we shifted to Schio. In Cremona, her mother was no longer alive while I still had part of my family here. In Cremona we were renting our house and our studio, while I had my mother’s apartment in Schio which was free. We also thought that leaving Cremona, would mean freeing us from her furniture-business related things and to dedicate ourselves only to art. She was very keen that we shift to Schio, even if Cremona was so much closer to Milan, which is the gateway to the international art-world.

We redid my mother’s apartment and we took a studio in Schio, and restarted everything here. But then her illness came back. She had first first been diagnosed in 2000, then it came back in 2018 and was worse. Fortunately, they were able to treat it with chemio and radiotherapy and she became well. That phase lasted till 2023, when it came back again. She died in April 2025.

Chiara was already an artist when we had met. She wanted to do some sculpture also, and was planning to go to a sculpture course in Venice by Francesco Messina (1900-95), but that course was cancelled because there were not enough students for it. She also wanted to learn engraving with Sergio Tarquinio (1925-2026), a famous illustrator and incision-artist in Cremona, but then I arrived in her life and she did incisions with me. However, we also became close friends with Tarquinio.

Her life was busy, she was working, looking after her mother who was ill and yet she participated in my work as well. For example, when I was teaching engraving and had 20-25 students, she used to come to our class after finishing her work and then help me with teaching, and we would continue till mid-night. She was a very special woman.

During the one and a half months of the Biennale, I was conducting workshops in collaboration with the Civic Museum of Cremona, for persons who wanted to learn the art of engraving. Some of the international artists also took part in those courses. We had students from different age groups, from school children to students of art-academies.

Sunil: Thanks Vladimiro for this wonderful talk. This exhibition has only Chiara’s artworks. We need to fix another appointment to talk more about your artwork, as well as about the interesting international connections you had with artists from other countries.

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