Emersions
Critical commentary by Lorena Gava
"Emersions" is the title of this new and important exhibition by Massimiliana Sonego. The artist continues to confront the emotional universe of objects linked to a strong and extraordinarily evocative personal memory. A memory that rises to become a symbol, or rather, a code of two-dimensional figure-signs, reduced to shapes that are indicative of a recognizable and authentic stylistic cipher.
Compared to previous works, there is a greater dynamism in the investigation and study of the object under consideration. The delicately Liberty-style jewelry box that belonged to the artist's mother and the shimmering, water-green fruit bowl, which, with the complicity of the family, was used to hold primroses in the new season, now take on, together with the faithful white glazed amphora, the consistency of "mobile" instruments in restless balance. A bird's-eye view encompasses a set of interpenetrating, self-moving forms, depleted of the axial statics that characterized previous representations, with the exception of the monumental eight-meter ribbon canvas that, like a Phidian frieze, embodied and still embodies an uninterrupted flow of sensations and thoughts that are nothing short of moving.
Each individual surface of the recent pictorial cycle appears composed of complex, elaborated material stratifications, a happy outcome of sedimentations and chromatic superimpositions that are studied and never abandoned to chance. The tactile eye passes from the rough asperities of the subdued and concentrated sands to the smooth and polished fields, sparkling with light and saturated with extremely bright pigments.
There is a fascinating mixture of geology and memory, and the object appears to emerge from an archaeological depth, bearing the signs of an ancient script, still steeped in the excavation earth, or the contours of a light, transparent, even ghostly body-substance. In any case, like "contemporary ostraka," the artifacts of a deep personal assumption parade, of an extremely sensitive consciousness that transforms past impressions into present geometries, into alphabets precipitated into current history to suggest and decipher multiple and varied horizons of meaning, as befits the great pictorial lesson.
For years, Massimiliana Sonego has been firmly pursuing an obsessive grammar of essence-things to achieve ever greater awareness of the potential of sign, color, and material in order to open up ever deeper and unexpected internal latitudes. How can we not look at the very recent oil-painted papers as another step towards an even more powerful and eloquent graphic synthesis in the eyes of the beholder? How can we not perceive in the summarizing force of thick and heavy lines, of white and sudden traces on the flows of yellow or red, the profiles of known meanings invested with a decidedly persuasive gestural charge?
Massimiliana Sonego's tireless research and creativity will not be long in venturing into other territories of inexhaustible scenarios and discoveries.
