Critical comment by Eugenio Manzato
Various components are the origin of Massimiliana Sonego's inspiration and support her creative drive: while her artistic activity was conscious and constant in later years, well after her forties, her vocation for art is indeed early, dating back to a childhood where she felt the need to draw everything, from her home to furniture, from domestic cats to portraits of sleeping parents.
Misunderstood and repressed vocation, vital energy channeled into masterful studies, considered very suitable for a girl from a good family, and then into work, marriage, and motherhood. Uncontainable impulses emerged from time to time, like the cetacean forced to surface to breathe oxygen: Vecchia casa, a painting from '75, rediscovered more than thirty years later in 2007, along with a few works encouraged by her father-in-law, an unrealized artist and therefore a participant in her struggle, bears witness to this.
Awareness takes place in view - will it be a coincidence? - of a collective exhibition for March 8, 2002, in Pasian di Prato: the trust shown by the fine critic Alessandra Santin, curator of the exhibition, remained a vigilant supporter of the artist until the present day. Massimiliana exhibits still lifes of fruit and flowers with a bold design and intense color, vaguely reminiscent of Cézanne, but characterized by a personal accent in the composition, sober and essential, in which objects from her domestic reality enter: in particular, a wavy-shaped table and a white ceramic flower vase are recurrent.
This phase, lasting about five years, is overcome thanks to a courageous decision: despite the distrust that her father-in-law had tried to instill in her towards the institution - "don't go to the Academy, they'll ruin you!" - Massimiliana enrolls at the Academy of Venice and attends its life drawing and painting courses, when her family and school permit. More than the teachings, however, it is the examples, comparisons, and stimuli that come from teachers like Carlo Maschietto and Luca Bendini, who are first and foremost artists, that are valuable. And the climate that stimulates experimentation, the overcoming of schemes, and the questioning of oneself is very valuable. So that in the spring of 2008, at the end of the academic year, in a collective exhibition at the Fornace di Asolo, the artist presents a series of acrylics on paper in which the same objects present in the previous compositions are presented by separating volumes from lines: "Works that arise from an intimate connection with the objects of everyday life. Lines that delimit these objects and merge into synthetic compositions, sometimes interrupted by bundles of color that tend to break their formal balance. In this apparently contradictory becoming, the will to reconcile opposites emerges: form and color, light and shadow, rationality and intuition."
This is the starting point for a new exploration: freed from objectivity and the laws of perspective, the new language allows Massimiliana Sonego to renounce representation and instead attempt to give shape to an inner vision. This leads to the development of a deeply personal style, which is exclusively based on her memory and thoughts, on how people, events, and objects have been stored in her mind. In this dimension, it is difficult to separate the past from the present, the above from the below. Massimiliana finds support and inspiration for this alterity - a fascinating "elsewhere" - in the pages of Italo Calvino, whose pages of Invisible Cities she annotates with drawings, almost fixing in this act the "project" of the compositions she will subsequently develop.
Therefore, the objects of which only a slender memory remains - the white vase, the music box, the fruit bowl, grandmother's chair, chest of drawers and bedside tables, the red armchair - are of equal value to the more abstract lines and color zones. It is a flowing, uninterrupted stream of liquid musicality that finds its most appropriate dimension in long canvases, but actually passes from one painting to another, where each individual work is actually only a single fragment of a single composition that could continue indefinitely. Her most recent graphic production gives direct testimony to this, where parts of a larger composition are literally cut out.
But the challenge continues. In a recent reflection - the only preamble to a catalogue consisting of only image of works between 2012 and 2014 - Massimiliana confesses how the boundaries between what should belong to the realm of certainties and what instead falls into pure possibility are increasingly becoming blurred and confused: "In the swirling overlap of Time and Space, thought loses its reassuring references; contents are liberated from their usual meanings and impose themselves with new and unknown evidence".
One can only appreciate so much intellectual honesty in an artist who responds to her own inspiration with such a discovered "truth", the only criterion for judgment in an era that has abandoned reference canons. And what is even more appreciable, beyond intentions, is the artistic result: seemingly intellectual and hermetic, Massimiliana Sonego's works actually require introspective commitment and the same precision in observation that the artist puts into their execution. Sublimated by ephemeral and daily passions, they take on a universal dimension: they are "tout court" classical works.
Critical commentary by Alessandra Santin:
"The fluid compositions dance together with the reader's gaze. The guidelines are always soft, unexpected, removed from structural rules and proportional relationships. For this reason, enjoyment overwhelms the viewer, involving them in the game of presences and absences, full boundaries and voids, possible relationships and dreamlike suggestions, sometimes absurd, often impossible.
Massimiliana Sonego can attribute a universal value to objects from her own history because the events she speaks of have an epiphanic course. Some memories shine above others for a 'different' superiority, which is both immediate and already ancient. Remembering is not understanding but revisiting past moments as experiences in themselves. All this becomes a true and always new visitation.
The objects present in flight confirm the Bergsonian hypothesis of memory as a "centrifugal process," which does not unify but decomposes. Each presence wants to be a never-fixed condition in interpretation and understanding, susceptible to continuous reinterpretations. The works of Massimiliana Sonego reveal a disappeared reality but capable of new infinite emergences, in an elsewhere constantly renewed. The same exhibition setup, with an installation character, induces a strong emotional experience, of penetration into a fluid, labyrinthine place, always different from itself, interrogative, unstable, alive, and therefore pulsating with life, destined for the present and elsewhere. Each work, as well as the exhibition in its complexity and entirety, represents for Massimiliana Sonego the possibility of seeking and offering a sense of memory and its deceptions, of the symbolic enigma of experienced time."
(from the exhibition catalog Memorie Altrove, 2015)
