Born in Riga in 1985, Valentina Kovalishina, in art Valentinaki, after studing economics, became a choreographer following her own artistic vocation, until her insatiable curiosity leads her to painting and the development of a style, albeit consistent, always new and surprising.Valentinaki's passion for painting and arts blossomed during her childhood, when she began her artistic training by attending a drawing course at the age of nine. From then on, Valentinaki dedicates herself to the research of color, first with watercolors and then with colored pencils with the Latvian painter Valeria Shuvalova. Arriving in Italy in 2009, she learns the art of oil painting with the Florentine artist Giusy Boncimelli, who imprints a technique that will remain indissolubly in Valentinaki's artistic baggage.

 

She has  developed her artistic career in Italy exhibiting in galleries and presenting site-specific art installations in public spaces around Italy and Europe. Her artworks are taking part of public and private collections all over the world. After a recentcollaboration with Luxury Hotel Vivienda in Jeddah, her art became famous also in Saudi Arabia. Valentinaki is the founder of the project "The Baltic Vibe" sponsored by the Latvian Ministry of Culture and the Latvian Embassy in Italy with a purpose to promote Baltic Culture abroad.

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Her pictorial style then receives a jolt when she realizes that her true vocation is abstract painting, in which the Latvian artist finds her maximum expressive potential. Always maintaining a poetic and aesthetic coherence, Valentinaki expands her artistic survey by focusing on the appearance and materials of three-dimensionality. The brushstrokes, in a crescendo of intensity, explode, becoming bas-relief and sculpture. Through the use of disparate materials and with a mixture of colors, lights, shadows and objects, the artist's brush depicts the subjects that are dearest to her.

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The waves of the Baltic Sea and the pristine beauty of forests and nature strike a deep chord in Valentinaki, making urgent her complaint against the human beings who ruin the world she lives in with pollution. The materials used in his work break, stretch forward, move restlessly, asking to be heard. It is the sigh of suffering nature, the dark bruises that Mother Earth is forced to show. In the midst of this heartfelt cry, she seems to see, among the spots of color, a tear falling, but also a hand ready to wipe it away. It is the artist who, with her own sensitivity and through the expressive means granted to her, gathers the tears so that nature may help, express and exorcise them. It appears here, among the nuance fits, a white, a tone, clear to restore the hope of a rescue. The material explicitness, of great visual impact, provides the key to the reading of Valentinaki's poetics. The black representations of oil in many of his paintings have a double meaning: it is dangerous because it is dirty, polluting, contaminating, polluting, but it is also a source of life, energy and sustenance.