Valeria Gaia was born in Treviso. After attending the university of Padova where she studied art history, she then moved to Paris where she first begins to devote herself to photography as an assistant, than as a photographer herself, focusing on portrait and reportage. Since 2000, long and frequent stays in Tahiti lead her towards a more free research through which she starts to explore aspects of nature in its essential elements: liquid, mineral, vegetable.

«I have been greatly influenced by the painting and the sculpture of the past as well as by the contemporary art, in my creative spirit I feel more close to the sensitivity of a painter or a sculptor. The ocean, the sky, the land are the backdrops; the forms arise from the game of the light with the infinite, astonishing, hallucinating variety of the reality.»

A painterly quality is the characteristic of her photographs. Valeria Gaia always works using natural both daylight and moonlight, colors and forms however extraordinary are real and never enhanced by computer.
Her photographs are printed on Hanemhüle, Canson cotton paper and on Awagami Japanese paper.

Valeria Gaia’s photography works were shown in Tahiti, Japan, France, USA, Spain and Italy.

«My photography, my artistic work is free from any social and political statement, I search for beauty inside myself and around me.
Beauty as the essential condition for  life, progress and the human dignity, this is my only statement.
Beauty arises through a complex network of elements made of : equilibrium, harmony, respect, order, equanimity, measure, goodness…
Beauty’s purpose is,  in a subliminal way, the nurture  for the spirit and the mind.
Beauty is a form of energy that keeps the human being  in touch with the sense of equilibrium, harmony, respect, order, equanimity, goodness…
The  thing we know for sure is the feeling of wellbeing, beauty always inspires us but something  happens deeply inside, we just don’t see it. This is the secret power of beauty and that’s how it’s meant to be.»

– Valeria Gaia 1.10.2014
If you photograph an object, a rock, a leaf, for example, you communicate only that object, rock or leaf. So, in order to communicate reality, you must photograph all rocks, all leaves, all clouds and all living things.

But there are shared forms among rocks, leaves and clouds: forms that I obtain by abstracting, distancing myself from single objects or creating directly from thought; forms that bring us at the same time toward rocks, and clouds, and living things.

So there are only two methods: the first setting out from the eye’s reality to arrive at that of the mind; the second setting out from the mind to head toward the eye’s reality.

The first is colored by the colors of visible reality, but far from the objects of common experience because composed of universal forms. (Liquid Memory).

The second is far from visible reality because in black and white, but close to it because composed of forms which can bring us toward the objects of experience, of life. (Pacific Landscapes).

In this way everyone, from the images projected upon paper, can journey freely toward the reality of their own lived experience, or connect their lived experience to images more general to universal forms that can bring them toward other experiences, other visions, and to the totality of the world.

– Luigi Cerantola Tokyo 2007
Liquid Memory is the title of Valeria Gaia’s collection of underwater color photographs that she has been taking in the Pacific Ocean since 2005.
Exodus and Confondersi are  black and white  underwater photographs.

«The ocean fascinates me, I observe it carefully, I feel it presently and  sometimes the beauty of nature unveils to me its magical and astonishing features.
Liquid memory as well as Exodus and Confondersi are my personal aesthetic contribute to the infinite and impermanent essence of life, to the infinite and impermanent beauty of the ocean.»

– Luigi Cerantola, Pordenone 2017
Quando un nume invisibile spinge il vento tra li alberi remotandone le foglie/agro squaderno in turbinio di scoloranze, ogni spirito che, via dal tentar l’inutili cieli in volo piegante pur sempre ad orizzonti di ritorno, si chini al cuore/pulsamento della terra, sente il brusìo segreto che disgrega in fibre ed ife quanto l’estate portò a verdeggiare in foreste di rami e d’ombre per meandri di fresco mistero, e sente il tutto pacificarsi alla gran quiete/immobilità dell’inverno lungo notti di stelle eterne-lucenti ai silenzî; e gli vien pensiero dell’orma sua: se come foglia ed erba possa persistere ai brevi dì che paiono tramonti, da che di foglie e d’erbe intravede le impronte rigare il terreno e sprofondar ai maceri in magma disparente al buio dei secoli facendosi immutante imagine di pietra, come ogni umano detrito, mentre noi si discende al muto baratro in coscienza di finale desiliamento/sparizione, sì che monta il desiderio di tramutare in linfari geometrie di foglie anche noi, a portarci lontano il gelo del gennaio e il sole basso oltre le siepi, oltre i campi, ove si plachi l’ansimo del vivere e con lui per sempre taccia l’orma dei passi spietati.

When an unseen numen heaves wind through the trees carrying the leaves far off/acrid squirls in a swirl of discoloration, each spirit that, far from fumbling for the bootless skies in a flight that descends always to horizons of return, inclines to the heart/the pulsing of the earth, hears the secret susurrus that decomposes into fibers and particles all that summer had brought to greenness in forests of branches and of shadows through mazes of fresh mystery, feels the all appeased in the great quietness/stillness of winter’s long nights of eternalgleaming stars in the silences; and comes then the thought of a footstep: whether, like the leaf and the grass, one can remain among the brief days that seem as sunsets, for the imprints of leaves and grass can be seen scoring the terrain sinking into the
magmatic waste disappearing into the darkness of the centuries to become images fixed in stones, like all human detritus, while we sink into the mute abyss aware of the final annihilation/disappearance, arousing in us the desire that we too transform into the vegetal geometries of leaves, to bear us away from the January chill and the sun low over the hedges, over the fields, the anguish of living becalmed and forever silenced the trace of pitiless footsteps.