I cortocircuiti prestabiliti" by Massimiliana Sonego
Critical commentary by Fabio Girardello
"The works on display illustrate a recent stage in Massimiliana Sonego's journey. An important stage that coincides with a clear, remarkable achievement, but which is better understood by reconstructing, albeit briefly, the artist's formative path.
Massimiliana Sonego's journey is not short: the "anthological" catalog, recently published but now completely surpassed by the current results, reveals that the artist had already achieved appreciable results in the 1970s and that she was already experiencing the anxieties that are a sign of more ambitious goals.
The artist had taken possession of some significant lessons: first those of Van Gogh and Gauguin, applied in a non-pedantic way through the Venetian reading of Gino Rossi. Massimiliana Sonego was looking for her way in the expressionist-fauvist field, although she adopted this historical macrocode, evidently considered essential, in a moderate, softened sense.
Massimiliana Sonego had an emotional approach to painting. In the works of formation, the affective element is evident: the artist highlighted, first of all, the need to give shape to the "lyric resonance" (Santese) produced by the data of daily life, to interpret her world: the hilly landscape, effectively internalized; the interior of her house-studio.
This urgency has not been set aside: it is also visible today, as a guarantee of an authenticity that over time has not been afraid to declare neither the reference masters nor the autobiographical and self-analytical reasons, albeit metaphorically transcribed in the "poetics of objects." Over time, the cognitive tools have become more refined. Affectivity has given way to studium.
The auctores become, explicitly, Matisse and Cezanne: two complementary references. In addition to being vitalistic and musical, Matisse's painting inaugurates a "non-Western" phase in 20th century painting: as happens in the great tradition of carpet weaving, the element that could superficially appear decorative becomes a rhythmic and modular scanning; two-dimensionality implies the overcoming of the conception of "space" codified by the logical-mathematical model of perspective.
According to purely Western canons, Cezanne says instead that everything we perceive can be broken down and translated into geometric forms: it is the "meditated form" that makes the act of painting mental. By internalizing these "dissonant" stimuli, Massimiliana Sonego's painting becomes gradually more finely analytical. We witness a progressive abandonment of representative inhibitions: chromatic selection follows pulsional urgencies, the artist questions the values of color as surface and as space.
The subsequent fragmentation of the image, no longer reducible to the icon, is an indication (not the only one) of a beneficial crisis that corresponds to Massimiliana Sonego's arrival in contemporaneity. I believe it is right to specify that contemporaneity does not necessarily mean updating to a standardized and progressive language. On the contrary, if the goal were this, the pictorial medium would be inadequate.
Today, the only language that effectively changes following the direction of updating is that which concerns technical application: an economic language, useful for communicating and magnifying the constant improvement and exponential richness of technological performance.
This does not necessarily imply a negative judgment: the often useless options of the mobile phone are multiplied up to paroxysm, but so are the useful applications of technology to medical science.
Instead, it is absolutely misleading and now out of date for art to be compelled to chase after the new, forcing a continuously delayed expression destined to be lost in showy and scandalous operations, flattening out into the rhetoric of communication: this has historically been demonstrated by the eclipse of the Avant-garde.
The language of painting, an ancient art stubbornly re-emerging despite the countless, tedious, and cunning announcements of the "death of art," is not a vehicular language. It is a special language that, as such, can also speak of other things, but that speaks above all of itself. Painting is a paradoxical and out-of-date art. Its "updating" coincides with the discovery of a law to which the individual painter, if he or she has the talent and lucidity, submits, proceeding to clarify step by step, day by day, his or her code, in a movement that goes towards depth, following the real urgency of expression.
In this journey, the contemporary artist is not intimidated by either the past or the "neurosis of the future," but chooses the tools that appear useful to him or her - whether they are ancient or new - recalling them, that is, updating them in relation to the meaning of his or her work. The expressive line to which Massimiliana Sonego has arrived, in some ways recalls the Cubist collage and the "painterly thoughts" of Second Futurism; in others, the two-dimensionality extreme of a certain Pop; but also - and perhaps more - the methods of the neo-metaphysical and non-figurative Italian painting of the Thirties (by Attanasio Soldati, Mario Radice, Bruno Munari, Osvaldo Licini, Luigi Veronesi). The playful, ironic reuse - and therefore markedly "contemporary" - of these linguistic tools has allowed her to bring to the surface, within the cage of distinct fields and chromatic-spatial intersections, the ghosts of those objects that are dear to her, and which the painter always and incessantly interrogates in her daily experience, reduced to silhouettes now graphically completed, now freely gestural, to which essential textures (of Matissian origin) and vigilant volumetric hints give substance. The result is a predetermined counter-circuit, in which the figurative recall contradicts the refined cleanliness of the tones and the distribution of the fields, ensuring an acceleration that is by no means taken for granted in the rhythmic progress of the compositions. This game has become particularly evident in the more recent works, in which the beloved object is perceived as an "energetic nucleus," ectoplasmic and at the same time absolutely concrete, barely containable within the fragile geometric reason of its exterior forms."
