"Walking I look at the sky / and I fall in love with the movement of the clouds". Anonymous 20th century

Florida Xheli was born in Fier (Albania). In 2002 she graduated from the Jakov Xoxa Art School in Fier. In September 2002 she moved to Italy where in 2007 she obtained a Diploma in Painting under the guidance of Daniele Degli Angeli and Emilio Mattioli and in Engraving under the guidance of Clemente Fava and Annamaria Stanghellini, at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. From 2008 to 2012 her artistic activity took place in her hometown. She re-enrolls at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, at the second level specialist, obtained in 2015: in Painting, under the guidance of Rinaldo Novali, and in Art Printing, under the guidance of Maria Agata Amato. She is present in several national and international exhibitions and has participated in several artist residencies. She is a member of the A.L.I Associazione Liberi Incisori and currently lives and works in Bologna.

...“Soft varnish is an engraving technique used to obtain a soft and delicate sign, to obtain a grainy line, similar to that of pencil, pastel or charcoal”: a common notion well known to all, but Xheli uses this technique with a wisdom that knows how to play on the most subtle and suggestive ambiguities: from chance to reality, from the fortuitous and abstract to the most realistic figuration, from suggestion to evocation. ...In the sequence of works we can see how the artist came to construct her project from a single image, from the relationship between dry land and clouds, to the solution of the clouds alone reflecting in the water and then in themselves, aware that they do not need nothing to exist except their essence, which, as the poets say, is that of dreams.

Marzio Dall'Acqua, from FLORIDA XHELI: mirror clouds, 2019