Lilly Varga is a Milan-based painter whose practice provides a counterpoint to a world defined by speed, disconnection, and sensory overload. Working with oil and gouache, Varga provides a slow and intimate reflection on what it means to be human today. Her latest body of work explores vulnerability and the fragile interiority of the human experience in the 21st century. Varga’s paintings address both the existential void felt in Western society and the stark realities of survival visible across the globe. She does not shy away from suffering, but treats it as a fundamental, even necessary, part of the human condition. At the same time, she critiques the sense of being unmoored in modern existence—a progressive dullness, a loss of inner direction.
“Varga provides a slow and intimate reflection on what it means to be human today,”
Varga often paints people she knows intimately, individuals with whom she shares profound personal bonds. These connections, lived in waking moments, frequently carry over into her dreams—and, in turn, her paintings. Her work is shaped by an ongoing exploration of fragility and the psychological pressure of existence in a world increasingly void of shared meaning. Through portraiture, she engages with suffering—not merely as pain, but as a condition of depth and awareness. Her figures inhabit quiet thresholds between visibility and disappearance, presence and memory.
Literature as Mirror and Muse
Lilly Varga Portrait, Courtesy of the artist.
Lilly Varga, “Study of a Dungeon Scene,” photo courtesy of the artist.
“My paintings are a kind of closing of the eyes,” she says—a sentiment rooted in the writings of Franz Kafka, who believed that only by closing one’s eyes could one truly hear the “inner music” of people and things. For Kafka, music (and by extension, art) had the power to elevate the inaudible, the unseen—uncovering what lies beneath perception. Varga’s paintings echo this ethos. They are tuned to vibrations we cannot hear, images we only sense once we stop looking outward and begin to listen inward.
Literature and philosophy are integral to Varga’s life and artistic practice. Beyond Kafka, her intellectual inspirations include Byung-Chul Han, Friedrich Nietzsche and Fyodor Dostoevsky—writers who challenge the surface of things and confront the raw interiority of the human psyche. Varga admits her thinking can seem abrasive at times, but it is anchored in a fierce kind of honesty and love. She credits Dostoevsky, in particular, with giving her “a grounding space,” admiring how he “managed to explain you to yourself 100 years before your existence.”
“My paintings are a kind of closing of the eyes,”
Lilly Varga
These philosophical underpinnings form one of the foundational components of her work. The other lies in Varga’s reflections on the role of painting in the digital age. She views painting as a universal language—one that speaks across time and culture in the form of gesture, emotion, dreams and the experiences of anguish and joy. But the place of painting has shifted. In an era when photography is ubiquitous—no longer as art but as compulsive consumption—Varga raises urgent questions. “I noticed that photography is not in control of seeing itself, but rather of what the modern human sees,” she notes.
This observation feels particularly prescient in the age of AI and digital filters. Photography, once assumed to be a document of reality, now often obscures more than it reveals. What happens when the eyes can no longer be trusted? In contrast, painting slows us down. It requires time—for seeing, thinking, feeling. Oil painting, in particular, unfolds at a human pace, allowing us to reflect not just on the image but on the conditions of our seeing. Whose perspective are we inhabiting? What assumptions are we bringing to the gaze?
Dreams as a Language of the Interior
Lilly Varga, “How to pray,” photo courtesy of the artist.
Varga’s work also attends carefully to space—not only the physical space of the canvas but the conceptual spaces between viewer, protagonist and artist. She invites the audience into her works to meet the painting with their own dreams and experiences, to enter into conversation—not just with the subject, but with the artist and, crucially, with ourselves. Her portraits offer a deeply personal point of departure but resist narcissistic inwardness. Instead they serve as mirrors, asking us to confront the pain, confusion, and longing within. Varga critiques the “narcissistically saturated, radical passivity” of the contemporary subject—individuals who feign being informed yet are profoundly disoriented. Her work insists on complexity, on the uncomfortable truth that we all know, made of fear, disappointment, and contradiction. These emotional resonances are visible in her figures. We can see the fear in the eyes.
“She invites the audience into her works to meet the painting with their own dreams and experiences,”
Disappointments alter the expressions. Eyes and mouths speak of the past, of lived realities, and also of the dreams of the past, while we know many dreams are yet to be dreamt.
This returns us to Kafka: the truths we cannot consciously perceive, but which emerge when the eyes close. That’s when truths unfold, when we connect with our most true selves and with our surroundings. When we hear and see everything. Her paintings capture that moment of closing the eyes and being one with all its intensities. One with ourselves maybe in a solitary moment, but also one with the person whom we are thinking of, whom we connect with in the most intimate way despite their physical absence. Like a dream sequence. In a world dominated by performative connection, dreams remain the last private realm. Varga’s paintings ask: how do we protect this space? How do we reclaim interiority in a time of total visibility?
Many of her portraits depict those who visit her in dreams—fleeting presences that inhabit the porous boundary between memory and imagination. Dreams, like paintings, often elude clarity. In our dreams, there is time and space for the inexplicable, and for what we have not yet seen. Some are vivid, others fragmentary. Some vanish at waking. Varga channels this ephemerality into her choice of materials. Her frequent use of oil on cardboard—an inexpensive, overlooked surface—functions as a powerful metaphor. Cardboard is transient, often discarded after serving its practical purpose. Yet it cradles the contents of our lives. In Varga’s hands, it becomes a keeper of memory, of dreams worth revisiting.
Blurred Realities and the Truths We Feel
Lilly Varga, “Consumer Confidence,” photo courtesy of the artist.
Lilly Varga, “Curtis,” photo courtesy of the artist.
These dreamscapes are often haunting, uncanny, yet always familiar. We recognize ourselves in their blurred features, shadowy interiors, half-seen gestures. Perhaps they unsettle because they confront us with emotions we’ve tried to bury. Varga draws inspiration from night sleep as well as the symbolism of daydreaming. She examines the difference between processing lived experience and imagining alternate realities—what has happened and what we hope might still come to pass, processing experiences and wishes, dreams and fantasies, blurry and smudged.
Visually, this translates into brushwork that echoes the vagueness of dreams or the haze of grief and trauma with smudges, edges blur, forms dissolve. Her figures exist in the tension between the seen and the felt. These blurred zones are not imperfections but revelations. They point to something not yet fully formed in our consciousness. And still, we know it. We’ve seen it before. We’ve felt it. And we will again.
“Her figures exist in the tension between the seen and the felt,”
In this way, Varga does more than paint the face; she paints the inner life. She demarcates private space on the canvas—not as enclosure, but as a zone of deep encounter. In these emotional topographies, the viewer is not outside the work, but inside it. We are asked not simply to look, but to feel, to question, to close our eyes and listen.
Lilly Varga, “Naehe der Ferne,” photo courtesy of the artist.
In her paintings, the private space of dreams, functions very conceptually, yet there is a physical presence on the cardboard, the canvas, the wood. There is space for continuation. She captures not just the conceptual essence of private space, of the inner self, but also marks said space on the canvas.
What’s the process to find the demarcation, or a delineation in the composition? There is the expression of the protagonist but we also immediately have a sense of a reflection of the inner self and of that private space. The blurriness or smudging of the edges of dreams are captured in smudged brushstrokes on canvas. They convey the details that are not (yet) fully formed, that escape a clear definition. These small parts that are not exactly clear, they hint at moments in dreamscapes and the subconscious that has a presence.
This blurriness also occurs in shock, grief, envy. We lose focus, everything gets blurry all around, visually but also emotionally and intellectually. Varga captures all of these layers. What remains after the image fades is what matters most: the lingering impression of a dream, a thought, a truth too delicate for daylight. Varga’s work is an invitation to dwell in this space—to slow down, to be present, to meet the self that lives quietly beneath the noise. Her paintings, like the closing of the eyes, do not shut us off from the world. They return us to it, more awake than before.
