Some artists chase darkness. Stefania Nazzal chases light, specifically, the seven-colored kind that shows up uninvited after a storm and disappears before you can point it out to anyone.
Nazzal has spent her career trying to hold onto that moment a little longer.
As a child, she saw a rainbow for the first time and was struck by it, not just visually, but emotionally. It became one of those rare memories that doesn’t fade with age; instead, it became the seed of an entire artistic language.
Long before she called herself an artist, Nazzal found comfort in coloring. It was a quiet, structured, meditative way of processing the world one shade at a time. That instinct never left her. Today, it shows up in ambitious sculptural works built from thousands of individually placed strands of colored PVC.
Nazzal’s process is part engineering, part improvisation. Each piece starts with a plan: a gridded base layer of PVC strings mapped carefully across the canvas, color by color, like laying the foundation of a building.
Once that structure is locked in, the rules loosen. She builds upward in layers, adding new color combinations more intuitively, responding to what the piece is telling her rather than the plan she started with. The repetition becomes almost trance-like, order giving way to spontaneity, and back again.
The result is what she calls a “colorscape”: a surface that shifts depending on where you stand, how the light hits it, and how long you’re willing to look.
It would be easy to read Nazzal’s work as purely decorative, and at first glance, the sheer vibrancy invites that reading. But there’s a deeper structure underneath the color.
A rainbow is really just physics: white light refracted through water into seven visible wavelengths. But across cultures, those same seven colors have long been mapped onto something less measurable: emotional states, energy centers, ideas of balance and wellbeing. Nazzal’s work sits right at that intersection: the scientific fact of light, and the symbolic weight humans have loaded onto it for centuries.
By scaling that spectrum up, repeating it, layering it, building it into physical structures you can stand in front of – she’s not just painting a rainbow. She’s amplifying what a rainbow has always meant to people: a flash of hope that’s gone as quickly as it appears, rendered permanent
PVC remains Nazzal’s signature material, chosen partly for its glossy, light-catching finish, and partly for a more practical reason, it repurposes a material that would otherwise end up as waste, giving it a second life as fine art.
But her practice hasn’t stayed static. Recent works fold in spray paint, diamond dust accents, and plexiglass casings additions that add new textures of shine, depth, and reflectivity to the string-based foundation she’s known for.
Nazzal’s work now bridges sculpture, painting, and installation, and it’s earning attention from collectors who are drawn to art that’s optimistic without being simplistic. In a market often dominated by irony or restraint, her rainbow-driven practice stands out for being sincere – built on a memory most people share, executed with a level of material rigor most people don’t expect.
Explore available works by Stefania Nazzal at Art Angels, or get in touch to learn more about current pieces and pricing.