The Interior, Code of Interiority.
About the painting of Massimiliana Sonego.
Critical comment by Corrado Castellani.
Contemporary painting that retains some connection, albeit tenuous, with figuration, reveals its debt to tradition by exhibiting its origin from one of the genres in which the iconography of art has been channeled over the centuries. Massimiliana Sonego's research, albeit through elaborate processes of coding and stylization, derives from still life or interior painting, genres that thematize a circumscribed environment, inhabited or not, but characterized by the presence of inanimate things and the relationships that exist between them. For the painter, these are household objects, everyday use artifacts, full of meaning, memories, emotions.
Unlike the use made by pop art of mass consumption product images, characterized by generalized fungibility and rapid obsolescence, in this painting, things retain a patina, an aura that accompanies them over time and makes them irreplaceable. Associated with traces of lived life, from which they cannot be separated, they are full of suggestions that recall experiences and situations of the past. This explains the devotion with which Massimiliana treats them, placing them at the center of her painting and transfiguring them into a repertoire of forms that return, variously cited, in her paintings. Interior painting becomes an investigation into the emotions connected to objects, on remembered events, on the alterations and redefinitions of memory over time, in an insistent recognition of interiority. They refer to an autobiographical heritage of intimate contents, essentially enigmatic for the viewer, of which it is possible to grasp only the accent, the meditative and melancholic character. The artist's interest is not directed towards the faithful restitution of the image of the object, but rather towards its evocation, through a shape that functions in the context of the painting as an ideogram. The object is thus cited, transformed into a visual element that enters into relation with other elements, juxtaposing or superimposing itself on them. The painting is configured as a dream theater whose interpretive keys we do not possess, which escapes immediate intelligibility, which does not explain but hints and hides, in an ironic and vaguely surreal way. Like a mysterious rebus (a message transmitted "with things"), whose solution cannot be discovered, but only its general intonation.
All this is stated with a pictorial language that is coherently interpretable starting from the fundamental concepts of pure visibility, identified by Heinrich Wölfflin more than a century ago. The linearity of the sign is in fact privileged, which delimits the visual objects with marked strokes, over pictoriality, which renounces perceivable drawing and leads to indeterminacy. It develops classically as a vision of the surface, excluding the vision of depth, connected to the presence of a multiplicity of planes. And it should not be forgotten that flatness and two-dimensionality (absence of modeling and chiaroscuro) constitute, according to Clement Greenberg, the fundamental characteristic of modernist painting. It relies on the closed form, which fully circumscribes the visual objects, rather than on the open and indeterminate form. Finally, it is based on the juxtaposition of a multiplicity of independent elements, rather than achieving the fusion of parts into organic compactness. Unity is not the law that governs these paintings, in which the elements remain defined in their autonomy, even if they relate to each other and if this relationship constitutes the original code of each canvas.
Linearity, superficial vision, closed form, and multiplicity are coherent symbolic forms that express a peculiar need for clarity, order, and control over the flow of sensations connected to the presence of objects. The chromatic choices can also be read in the same direction. The supremacy of form is accompanied by the homogeneous filling of the color areas, which with bold tones, dominated by red, betray the emotional impact but at the same time, do not give up on keeping it in check, managing it, almost to avoid being overwhelmed by the incandescent current of thoughts and feelings from which this painting takes its origin.
