Transitions?
Critical comment by Lorena Gava

Carlo Maschietto and Massimiliana Sonego were, for some years, teacher and student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Venice. Generally, when I ask an artist about their training, the reference to the Master is often inevitable, but everything happens on the level of memory, teachings, and words.

So, I imagine gestures, arm and hand parables, discussions about the sign, color, technique, and materials. I have always wondered how verbal and physical actions of a Master can be translated and received by the eye and mind of those who look and listen with the intention of learning. What are the contaminations, tangencies or natural differences justly defended by distinct and distant figurative universes and authentic stylistic differences?

A comparison, starting from their respective realizations, allows us to establish the probable mutations, cultural and semantic grafts, or absences (but are they real absences?) enunciated by distinct and distant figurations. Carlo Maschietto and Massimiliana Sonego appeared to me immediately very different.

First of all, one seems to prefer, at least in this cycle of works, the small format, the other the large dimensions. Carlo's paintings are the result of an elaborate process of thought and matter, the chromatic stratification follows a perspective and mental depth in which the coordinates of time and space seem to coincide in the expanded horizon of landscapes with a precise physical and at the same time meta-physical identity, real pieces of past and present memory. I refer, in particular, to the works in which some recurring components dominate: the sea, the ship, the dunes, and a very small, enigmatic, male figure.

Through differentiated and varied chromies in tones, so much so that each work can be recognized individually in yellow, pink, white, or orange, vaguely auroral or crepuscular expressions, the Master stages visions that become extraordinarily large from minimal, in a crescendo of vertigo and dimensional inversions. There is a subtle, rhizomatic, deeply studied, and perfectly composed game of evolving situations, disturbing instabilities, inside an apparently calm and static trend. In reality, what we witness, especially in the foregrounds, is a magical vibration of allusive metamorphoses, of surreal migrations between the animal and vegetable kingdom within disturbing silences. And the silence increases in that sort of triptych, of more evident measures, in which chromatic laying becomes the body and substance of an abstract and intimate material narrative, a sort of interior writing made of tensions and abandonments, ripples and relaxations, rough surfaces in relief, and smooth plagues. Who knows if these compact and "liquid" mineral correspondences found an echo in the textures imbued with sand and superimpositions peculiar to Massimiliana Sonego. For some time now, the painter has amazed with her rare and strong awareness of the material used. Her world, immersed in the decomposition and disarticulation, almost heraldic, of some familiar objects, fascinates for the happy combination of signs but above all for the compositional balance given by the chromatic sedimentations, by the intersections of the expertly combined pastes. The dynamism that characterizes her recent works seems to accompany, in a flow of matter and gesture, the flow of thoughts:

Massimiliana gives shape and consistency to time through the concentration of entities dear to her that, although transfigured, maintain certain and traceable boundaries. Here the maps of a personal geography, nourished by graphics, lead towards magnetic figural circuits and the geometry excites for the stimulating provisionality of the represented and skinned objects, waiting, perhaps for a reconstitution and a reformulation. Incompatible on the plane of visual representation, the universes of Carlo Maschietto and Massimiliana Sonego find, in my opinion, worthy parallels in the common intent to live matter as a privileged tool of signification, as a starting point for every transition within the labyrinths of strongly individual sensibilities. The works tell the same will to accumulation and excavation, rigor and control, the suffering emergence of those ganglia that allow every existence to recognize itself and truly be such.

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