“The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative […]”
Thomas Stearns Eliot
“The object allows me to see the invisible and give shape to my thoughts,” says Massimiliana Sonego, a refined painter of “interiors,” as art critic Lorena Gava has defined her: chairs, armchairs, vases, ornaments—objects that belong to the artist’s lived experience—are the protagonists of her artistic and philosophical research.
When I went to visit Massimiliana Sonego, I thought again of a book by Sandra Petrignani that I deeply loved, La scrittrice abita qui (The Writer Lives Here). The author writes that by “listening to things,” by observing furniture and furnishings, rooms and gardens, she managed to enter into symbiosis with the most intimate lives of some of the most significant women writers of the twentieth century, so as to recount their sentimental and literary histories.
With the same state of mind, I entered Massimiliana’s home. I observed objects, paintings, furniture, then immersed myself almost in “apnea”—to quote the title of one of her paintings—into the magical atmosphere of the atelier, trying to grasp certain aspects of her creativity which, with an original and unmistakable stylistic signature, expresses itself in a poetic and intimate narrative of everyday life.
The atelier represents her refuge where, in a regenerating silence, she reconnects with herself. On the canvases—from the small ones to those of scenographic dimensions—the objects she likes to call “objects of affection,” memories of a lived experience, past and present, are fragmented into multiple relationships and whirl through space in a disorienting, almost magical way, with clear references to the avant-garde movements of the twentieth century.
Her work, born from the need for a realistic representation of objects, has evolved—through a search for essentiality—into a deeper investigation. Thus, objects, while still preserving traces of time and evoking the lives of those who owned them, take on a strong symbolic value, with an undeniable reference, in my view, to the poetics of T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative.” In a 1919 essay, Eliot explained his idea of art as follows: poetry must not express emotions, but rather find in concrete, everyday reality objects, situations, and facts capable of evoking them.
Before Sonego’s canvases and engravings, the viewer—fascinated by the variety of forms and chromatic choices—is led not only to appreciate their aesthetic quality, but also to investigate the meaning of things and to question the complexity of reality. Particularly emblematic in this sense is the large canvas Parata, where the artist, through the multiplicity of depicted objects—fragments of a reality in continuous transformation—seems to suggest infinite possibilities of reading and interpretation to the observer.
Franca Benvenuti
