Hymn to Duration
Critical commentary by Alessandra Santin

In Massimiliana Sonego's works, there is a strong tension towards "duration," a Handkean category that is alien to eternalization and instead pays attention to the sacralization of the provisional, the momentary... Massimiliana Sonego pursues this goal through a methodical and in some ways cerebral approach: she arranges everyday objects in space according to a complex articulation. Thanks to proximities, lights, confrontations, and contacts, the "things of always" acquire new forms, visions that light up colors, draw plastic lines, reform the world. From the juxtaposition of all the elements, now protagonists, emerges that no longer momentary contingent that makes things be as they are and something more thanks to the possible dialogue that takes place between them and with us. Then space no longer seems sufficient for that secret order, that sort of sought-after balance, finds its overcoming, creates the incompleteness that invites the reader to continue the artist's task in their own world. Thus, even the context in which Sonego's works are exhibited is colored. The use of material texture, bright colors, the overcoming of the usual and traditional perspective... takes place beyond the frame (always sought after, often old or artisanal...) and invades everyday life, allowing the poetic vision of the artist to live on and to overcome, in place, the chronological dimension of time. In "Duration," therefore, Sonego's constructive and architectural painting, proceeding through landscape synthesis rather than analysis, proposes new incisions, additions and reflections, the double or the mirror... in the awareness that complexity is the dominant model of contemporary culture. It, even through aesthetics, can manifest itself only once, in the perfect and minimal simplicity that is proper to the beauty of every work of art."

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