In her work nature and artifice, reality and fiction, provide the material for investigating perceptive thresholds, suspended between concrete experience and abstraction.
Whether in drawing, photography, or other expressive ways, her research is aimed at detecting traces.
Traces of a landscape, of an atmosphere. ‘Views’ where the gaze and the world meet, where perhaps the viewer will enter in turn, with his feelings, his memories.
For years Viale has been working with frottage drawing on rocks and stones. This practice, which takes place through physical contact with mineral surfaces, responds to the artist's need for a direct and bodily relationship with the substance of the world.
Various other projects of hers take shape with photography, which she considers to be a form of contemplation. It allows the gaze some seconds more than usually granted, like long exposures enable the camera lens to reveal what can sometimes be seen, but rarely preserved with the eyes.
Over the years, she has also been using other media, to create installations, videos and pieces that explore digital techniques. The latter, although originating with photographic shots, move away from an immediate link with reality, towards an explicitly abstract formalisation.
The non-documentary character of her works, and an approach leaving space for chance and the unexpected, recurrent throughout her use of various techniques, suggest places to be experienced without narrative or spatial/temporal preconditioning.
‘En plein air’ research and the physical relationship with the environment where she works are important components of her creative process. Through nature – in urban contexts as well as in wild sites – she questions spaces of possible intersection between the external world and interiority.
Viale’s ‘landscapes’ are invitations to cultivate a contemplative look at the world, which, beyond its subjective significance, may have an important impact on our relationship with the environment.
An artist-in-residence at the Djerassi Foundation in California, the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Florida, and the Fondation La Napoule in France, she has shown her work in museums, art galleries, and institutions, including the PAV - Centro Sperimentale d‘Arte Contemporanea, the 14th Rome Quadriennale - Anteprima Torino, the Museum of Natural Science, and the Festival Internazionale Cinemambiente in Turin; Triennale in Milan; Gallerie degli Uffizi and Museo Marino Marini in Florence; Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Villa Croce in Genoa; Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea and MART in Trento; Heinrich Gebert Kulturstiftung Appenzell; Italian Cultural Institute, Académie royale des Beaux-Arts, and Centrale for Contemporary Art in Brussels.
In 2015 she created and curated “a due”. Arte Contemporanea in Italia e Belgio, a three-year project opening a dialogue between Italian and Belgian artists at the Italian Cultural Institute of Brussels. She is co-founder of MODO, a cultural association based in Brussels, aimed at stimulating the dialogue on the centrality and importance of artwork in today's perpetual panorama of instant images.