Critical Commentary on Pillon

"[...] even the red of Massimiliana Sonego surfaces. It's the color of furniture and furnishings that have always kept her company. A color that then frees itself from the object. Design and color then separate and dissociate, take different paths, overlap, but don't match, slip into counterpoint and float freely, forming joyful and sumptuous tesserae that evoke Matisse, Picasso, and Braque. Decoration? Not only. Sometimes, a fluorescent orange spot, edged in black, returns to the surface. It's the stylization of an innocuous fruit bowl. But it breaks and opens the image, like the mouth of an oven, culinary, crematory - as Claudia Buttignol pointed out to us a few days ago. Bold red oven, Zanzotto would say again. Is that perhaps the punctum? And perhaps there the disturbing element? It doesn't veil but surrounds - Massimiliana - the empty-fullness of the Thing. Among the ash-gray of lost presences of Mother, the orange fruit bowl is a vital life raft to cling to, the artist confessed to me. But it's also something else. It's the traumatic encounter with the presence-absence of the Mother: it calls us back to her womb, protruding in its incandescence.

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