Massimiliana Sonego: between matter and form
by Stefano Cecchetto
Massimiliana takes her time with her work: she thinks, elaborates, organizes, arranges, and only then confronts the canvas with full awareness; energetic and poetic, the painting then flows freely, like a form of writing through images. In this context, the most striking singularity of Massimiliana Sonego’s work lies in extending its boundaries—or its contrasts—so far as to include languages that, in any other artist, would appear irreconcilable with one another. The contradiction, if we may call it that, begins to dissolve when one reflects on the point of view and understands the astonishing symbiosis with the subject, most often resolved with superb elegance. After all, when art becomes stylistic force and inner structure, incorporating itself without residue into the expressionism of the mark, it is natural that representation sinks its roots into literature, history, and even art history itself.
In the time/non-time of contemporaneity, the artist presents her work in a context that increasingly appears ephemeral and precarious. Consequently, the artwork assumes a secondary role, as it is the figure of the artist who, through her presence, confirms the meaning and strength of the mise en scène. Massimiliana Sonego, instead, prefers to let her work speak for itself, grounding everything in the meaning of the artwork—in the sense of deciphering the sign. In this way, the image becomes a narrative emblem that reveals hidden formulas, or those concealed behind the semblance of a deceptive figuration.
From a calibrated and skillfully organized painting, with vivid chromatisms and forms suggesting personal geometries, the artist then arrives at an introspective and poetically lyrical phase. Within this intimate path, Massimiliana does not seek prescribed symmetries, but rather claims a gravitational pull of the space of intervention toward new, sensitive objectives of vision, and for this reason immediately direct and meaningful. It is to this root, therefore, that one must return: to the natural gesture of her painting, so distinctly unmistakable, yet placeable within a classicism that transcends the extreme and opposing limits of abstraction and figuration.
Pure painting and pure poetry: sign, form, and color, which the artist claims as a conditio sine qua non for affirming a lyrical condition that goes beyond fashions and conventions. Jean Cocteau once said of Picasso, “Un peintre qui a l’air d’écrire” (“A painter who seems to be writing”); Massimiliana Sonego comes very close to this definition, as she succeeds in transferring thought onto the canvas and restoring its meaning in an immediate and readable way.
The purely “passional” concepts of her painting are tightly incorporated into the sign of an extremely austere art that opens and closes within the tangled knot of an attentive and sensitive arrangement. Within the calm demon of geometry, of scrupulously elaborated and balanced composition, Massimiliana confronts her path which, through the dismantling of forms, continues to unfold along the subterranean thread of tradition.
It is as if the artist were looking backward in order to understand our time; too disillusioned to still believe in the dreamy evocation of backgrounds and distances of a rugged reality, Massimiliana explores the past and brings it back to the present solely through the trace of a personal pictorial action. Thus appear the objects that surround her: The Sofa, The Mad Bedside Table, The Plant, The Screen—emblems of an apparent figuration that painting redeems from everyday life through the ringing chromatisms of an absolutely personal composition.
In all her works, even the most recent ones, a romantic restlessness emerges, which the artist lets evaporate within the evocative images of her narrative. The slow and decaying adherence of tones, the schematic construction of masses that recalls the valuable teaching of Cézanne, contribute to the elaboration of a thoughtful reality, solidly constructed within a melancholic inner atmosphere.
Beginning with the title of this new exhibition—Soundings and New Emergences—hosted in the halls of Spazio Thetis in Venice, which suggests the sense of a research comparable to the dynamics of a dive into deep waters, where one continues to swim without pause to explore the unknown, occasionally lifting one’s head in the liberating act of breathing. And it is precisely in that instant of emergence, in that momentary breath, that one can still grasp the sound, the roar, and the immense vitality of the inexhaustible pictorial universe of Massimiliana Sonego.
