For some time now, the expressive style of Massimiliana Sonego has been recognizable—indeed, unmistakable. The artist has accustomed us to a fractured, broken, prismatic vision of objects such as chairs, armchairs, vases, and tables, which appear gutted, sectioned, and hurled into a sort of perceptual vortex. Are we faced with frontal views or with fragmented worlds seen from a bird’s-eye perspective? It is not easy to say, because, as in a shattered mirror, the painted shards reflect up and down, inside and outside, in an endless play of cross-references.
Massimiliana Sonego’s painting is governed by a precise and rigorous mark, by a geometry that prefers, to regular forms, the irregular course of a line that coils in on itself and then yields to the allure of a skewed, dynamic movement with futurist echoes. The fact remains that the viewer, standing before each canvas, is overwhelmed—almost drawn in—by the tireless, continuous wave of forms that, time and again, await deciphering and perception in order to be “joined” into a readable syntax.
It is a mosaic whose unruly tesserae (“Il comodino matto” is the title of a work from 2022) open onto universes in perpetual transformation and evolution, far removed from any temporal order. There is no before or after, no past and not even a present: it is the uninterrupted flow of an “open” work—evoking Umberto Eco’s famous definition—whose aesthetic and formal identity is subject to constant reversals and variations, driven by a decidedly seductive virtual kineticism. Massimiliana Sonego puts us to the test and almost questions us, offering a thousand possible readings and interpretations before each canvas.
The individual chromatic fields within the varied fragments of furniture and tableware appear like the brilliant panes of a beautiful kaleidoscope that, when turned, composes and decomposes, aggregates and disintegrates. We remain fascinated by the light, by the magic of the creations, by the incessant combinations and associations, by the inexhaustibility of the imaginative projections. In a perfectly coordinated action, the hand and the eye of the painter from Conegliano give life to a figuration that changes without ever repeating itself, and in this we seem to grasp the ceaseless motion of life, with the energy that governs and accompanies every transformation beyond any temporal limit or threshold.
The artist’s most recent production stands out for a centripetal force that is nothing short of magnetic, linking every fragment-aspect in an extremely deep process of stratification and accumulation, so that nothing is lost or misplaced. In the refraction of light, in the tonal vibrations, and in the chromatic short circuits, there is the constant pleasure of attentive direction, of an authentic and sincere practice of painting, of a formal construction that is investigation, writing, and synthesis in the wake of unforgettable avant-gardes. Massimiliana Sonego fuses and confuses, within an extraordinary lexicon, well-known visual grafts and contributions—beginning with the never-extinguished cubist vertigos—to arrive at entirely personal outcomes beneath a sky of provocative and disorienting instability.
A refined painter of “interiors,” her compositions—whether paintings or engravings characterized by the synthesis of the mark in the dialectic of black and white—lead to precious and secret inner latitudes. The works stage places that, although devoid of physical structures, stimulate curious mechanisms (“Ingranaggi 2” is the title of a vividly colored work from 2023) of thought and memory, always poised between poignant nostalgia and awareness of present realities. The intent remains that of embracing time and things in a direct, powerful, and constant confrontation between life and art, truth and imagination.
Lorena Gava
