Critical commentary by Lorena Gava:
Born in Treviso, Massimiliana Sonego earned a degree in Painting and Decoration from the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice, after attending a school for nude studies. She recently attended courses in non-toxic engraving with Professor Paolo Fraternali at the same academy. A primary school teacher, for years she has exhibited mainly in Italy with remarkable critical and public success.
After her early figurative paintings, which focused on still lifes, around the first decade of the 2000s, the artist abandoned herself to an evocative abstract and geometric world, reflected in the decomposition and disarticulation, almost heraldic, of some familiar objects such as jugs, chairs, tables, and boxes. The dynamism characterizing her recent works seems to accompany the flow of thoughts in a gesture of material flow: Massimiliana Sonego gives shape and consistency to time through the concentration of entities dear to her, which, although transfigured, maintain visible and traceable boundaries. The maps of a personal geography nurtured by graphics excite for the magnetic circuits and the stimulating provisionality of the objects that, thus represented and skinned, remain waiting, perhaps, for reconstruction or reformulation.
The happy chromatic mixes, the result of long-elaborated and studied stratifications and experiments, open up to multiple interpretive horizons. Sometimes the painting seems to border on relief sculpture territories, and the images seem to emerge from a vast and complex underground of individual and poetic memories rendered with rare coloristic skill. The latest production includes large works with titles related to the words "time" and "space," which rise to universal categories that here leave room for deeply experienced interior latitudes in which sky and earth, imagination and reality, seem to coexist and cohabit. The gaze is captured by a visionary inspiration that opens up to almost filmic projections, with destabilizing outcomes that induce dreaming, imagination, and the dreamlike dimension of the fairy tale. Massimiliana Sonego's works are vortexes of light and sign, powerful mandalas offered to a retinal synthesis that, in the whirlwind of lines and fillings, captures the beauty of an almost Futurist and surreal impulse.
Among the most important recent exhibitions, we recall the solo exhibitions at Ca, da Noal (TV), at Palazzo Sarcinelli in Conegliano (TV), at the Talenti Gallery in Portobuffolè (TV), and in 2018 at the Ancient Camaldolese Hermitage in Rua di Feletto (TV). She lives and works in Conegliano (TV).
