Skiagrafie is an installation aiming at relativizing the very idea of jewel as object and ornament, projecting it into a network of relationships between materiality and image. The work draws its departure from the literal meaning of the term skiagrafia – the ancient painting technique of chiaroscuro –, namely, the writing/inscription/design (graphìa) of shadow (skià). A shadow is defined as a discontinuity of the luminous flux due to the presence of an object. Continuity (light), in the physical world of our phenomenological experience, is thus related to discontinuity (shadow). This relation, however, is not an exclusive opposition, but a singular and indiscernible coexistence. The variety of reflections and refractions is the way in which things appear to us and make it visible. The chiaroscuro raises the problem of the priority of deformation (continuous variation) with respect to the abstract (classical) representation of the form-matter relationship. It is in this sense that the writing of shadows allows us to think of jewel as de-formation. The installation consists of four elements: