Sonia Costantini, presso lo Spazio Sincresis di Empoli (in italian language)

Sonia Costantini returns to her studio  (in italian language)

Sonia Costantini – pittura analitica origini e continitá (in italian language)

The art of Sonia Costantini and the Panza Collection

by Giuseppe Panza di Biumo

I have known her work for some years now and I have seen a continuous development and maturing of her technique in the direction of a more radical abstract composition, eliminating residual formalisms and improving her method of elaborating light which makes her work so fascinating. The technique used by the artist involves applying a ground of an acrylic, opaque colour with the superimposition of marks or patches of the same colour although this time in oils, therefore bright and reflecting. This amalgamation of the absorption and reflection of light creates both magical and surprising effects.

In order to view the result wanted by the artist it is necessary to look for a viewing point that is suited to this purpose.

The observer has to move in front of the painting until its surface transforms itself.

At first sight it may seem like a sum total of small reflecting surfaces which provoke the disappearance of the colour: moving to the opposite side of the inclination of the lighting, however, the transformation is radical.

From being a bodiless and indistinct luminous reflection the colour becomes something substantial, although intensely dynamic: from a static condition to something that becomes. The colour becomes strong, powerful, almost aggressive, and at the same time it becomes inconsistent, a mass without mass.

From a scientific point of view light is a wave, it is not matter but only energy. However, when it enters into contact with us and with things it is heated, transforming itself into a corpuscular substance having a very small mass that is compensated by a large quantity of radiation which makes it something necessary for life, the most necessary.

Sonia Costantini has made a miracle by evidencing this two-fold invisible reality of light. Two completely different realities which ought to reciprocally destroy each other instead of becoming a substance that gives us life.

An amazing scientific phenomenon discovered after centuries of research and by the artist understood and carried out intuitively.

How a wave becomes a corpuscle is an absolutely incomprehensible phenomenon, given that they are opposites.

In: Sonia Costantini.Il colore dentro, LAC – Lagorio Arte Contemporanea, Brescia, 2010, Ed. LAC, Brescia

Translated by Howard Rodger MacLean

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“Freedom of thought-light”

by Claudio Cerritelli,

Constructing Colour was the title of an exhibition held about ten years ago in Milan in which Sonia Costantini presented her work with a group of paintings suspended on the shadows and the aurorae of light, on pictorial values gauged within the incorruptible vision of the monochrome, eternal obsession of doing painting at the limits of the visible.

In developing the idea of those works, sustained by the purity of the geometrical structure, the artist has faced the physicalness of painting with slow movements of revelation of light, no longer anchored to the certainty of a measurable space but to the elusive thought of colour which goes to meet the infinite revealing of itself.

By way of the process of purification of the surface from whatever structural apparition, today her work has dissolved the modalities of geometry in the event of the light that comes out of colour, from it emanating its own essence with slight discardings, by way of impalpable transparencies which exalt its changing glimmer of lightness.

In this exclusive ‘journey’ Costantini has removed the superfluous, the threshold of colour supports itself, it is the field of vibrations underlying the always different spreadings of the pigment: there is no limit to the specific nature of its becoming pure canto, mental emotion of the visible and imagination which is born from the freedom of sinking within the perception of the invisible.

The tension towards the regions/extents of the monochrome is inscribed in the history of the aniconic painting of the Twentieth Century. Its foundations are to be found in the wish for synthesis of the constitutive elements of painting. In consequence, it bears in mind the roots of Abstract Suprematism and pictorial Constructivism which spurred on the historical avant-garde towards a profound criticism of the concept of representation.

Costantini feels part of this tradition. She is not, however, interested in the zero degree of painting in the radical version of Minimalism. Rather, she loves feeling the abstract as an idea united to experience, not closed within the tautological measure of the chromatic code but open to further meanings: evocations of the ‘elsewhere’ tied to the apprehensions of existence.

In this perspective the analytical knowledge of the painted surface is the preliminary experience for the ritual exercise of the gesture that halts time, it suspends space in its own internal flowing, feeling it as a vital exercise, an interior vision which acts and reflects on light as place of meditation.

In: “Sonia Costantini” – Percorsi del colore 02, edizioni Nicolodi, Rovereto, novembre 2005

Translated by Howard Rodger MacLean

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Painting of revelation

by Annarosa Buttarelli

When we are in the presence of a great author is an obligation, both ethical and scientific, to put aside the temptation of giving the work a reference, creating an affiliation, placing it quickly in movements, memberships, exclusivities. These are short roads that facilitate only the composition of the puzzle of the art market, not certainly an interpretation of the work nor the subjective relationship with it. Sonia Costantini is a good example of this conviction: her patient, daily artistic research is still far enough away from seeing recognized in its originality, although she has already been mentioned among the “great artists” that run through the vicissitudes of contemporary painting. A good opinion about this originality came from Panza di Biumo, when he said that the work of Sonia Costantini is “colour painting”.

I do not know if the renowned contemporary art collector had in mind, with this formula, the same that I’m going to propose, starting from my experience of reading the works, but I know we must try to guess “what” she paints, painting colours only, and what she wants to transmit in this long phase of the artist’s career, choosing a colour, as well as honouring a unique spiritual presence.

There is no doubt that the painting of Sonia Costantini is a spiritual experience, more than aesthetic: his paintings, tiny and delicate for dimension, immediately impose a certain gesture of body, like when you have to pray, to meditate, to listen to a vibrant note beneficial to the life of the spirit. The Art of Painting, as written by Maria Zambrano, “is the daughter of religious light of the mysteries.” In fact I think we are looking at a painting of revelation, and the artist’s research promises to be a continuous search for spiritual re-revelations, identifying in the colour a sign of eternity: colour and revelation (put the veil) in origin have more or less the same meaning. The Indo-European root of the word “colour” is Kal which means roughly “hide”, return to cover, to veil what was about to manifest itself fully and that it was only glimpsed, according to our human shadow. In addition, “colour” means “added quality”, because “placed over the object”. The colour not only covers, but also adds a new quality offered by artistic intuition to what has been revealed.

The work of Sonia Costantini, in its originality in the vast world of monochrome painting, is the kind of re-revelation she wants to show, very close to the Sanskrit name of colour, VARNA, intended as epidermal coverage. You can understand what she has accomplished watching the media she used: layers of tiny, extremely precise, countless pigment until the colour is re-veiled. The effect is more tactile than visual, at first glance: it’s like a skin, an alive and pulsating skin, even changing in its form and in its nuances depending on the light on the canvas.

It’s a sympathetic skin that Sonia Costantini puts to cover the body of the revealed object; and the skin has elasticity, vitality, even the lightness necessary to keep safe but also to keep warm what is invisibly covered.

The Church Fathers conceived the colour as “writing with light,” and we can talk, about Sonia, of ‘painting-writing’, alluding to the golden background of religious icons but also conceiving the strokes as letters of a secret alphabet. Even the act of writing (another way to re-veil) can fit to illustrate the art of Sonia, but we have to qualify it more, to do justice to her originality: we must be able to see that it is a writing style that makes visible material DNA found in skin and reconstituted with devotion on an invisible body. And you can have a legitimate hypothesis that the above-mentioned “body” is pure white, total and absolute light, or the “virginal body” which, as Byzantines said, supports colour and by this is concealed. Perhaps the physically consistent body is the source of all creations, not a impalpable ghost.

In this exhibition at Milione Gallery there are two white paintings on a wall, and this white is painted in virtuosic variations of opal and leucos, just to mention the real issue at stake: “the absolute white where all the colours are over, like rivers into the sea “(MZ); the skin of the two white paintings is only an announcement, a revelation. So, next to the front door, to protect it, here is a golden yellow, alone to protect the “royal doors” of the mystery of the impossibility, for humans, to withstand the sight of the absolute transcendence. And the sea is present in the “horizons”, ten canvases on wooden planks, springs from various horizons of blue that flow together in the two larger canvases, Blu Reale, where the rivers converge playing on the ambiguous meaning of ‘real’ that melts into the perfect formula of ‘sovereign reality’. This is an insight that connects the artist with the entire eternal search to which I have alluded, in which she continues to allude.

For this exhibition, the artist says she has thought about the dissemination, to the fragments, scattering in an ellipse on a wall 18 small paintings whose title/colour is linked to real gemstones. Even in this case, the fragments of astral skin combine to draw a creative cosmic vortex which, again, brings us back to the originality of Sonia Costantini: these fragments are mystical babbling, concretions of colour that reveal not the original explosion of creative light that we will never see, but reveal his potentialities. You could even imagine it as an itinerary from colour to colour, as a harmonious melody. This is the direction of the work of Sonia Costantini: spiritual landscapes that have the greatness of the universe, held entirely in a pearl of absolute invisible whiteness.

(October 2014)

in: “Sonia Costantini. Colore apparente”, catalogo della mostra, Galleria Il Milione, Milano, Bollettino del Milione n. 189, Milano, 2014

Transalated by Tommaso Sante Monorchio

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The slow and out-of-date treasure of Sonia

by Fabrizio D’Amico,

One has to stay at length, and in silence, in front of the canvases by Sonia Costantini, a necessary condition of seeing. These canvases therefore demand a great deal from the person who approaches them, something which painting normally doesn’t ask. And even if it is true, on the other hand, that real painting needs to distance the ‘bulkiness’ and noise of existence from itself in order to really make itself heard then this truth, a conditioning one in Costantini’s case, creates a profoundly anomalous exception with respect to the time in which she lives.

Out-of-date for this reason, consequently, prior to and more so than for the presumed outdatedness of the exercise today of the ‘craft’ of painting and of monochrome painting in particular. All things considered, were this the only question then it would suffice to give Costantini authoritative ‘fathers’ (ranging from Mondrian to Albers, Rothko and Reinhardt and to all of the analytical painting of the 1970’s – a genealogy drawn up for her work on more than one occasion and with diverse plausibility).

And yet even admitting that a part – and only a part – of those names can really be considered “fathers” with regards to her work, I don’t believe that to acknowledge in Costantini a personality which is congruously organic with that paradigmatic axis is able to bring us closer to a real understanding of her painting. A painting which takes place today – and it seems that one too often seems to want to forget this – surrounded by a world that regarding her declares quite different forms of extraneousness which Albers, let us say, could firstly have felt in Weimar and subsequently at Black Mountain College. And this does not only come to play on the possible perception of the work but also comes into play in its moment of germination – firstly and in an even more important way. This is because Costantini is perfectly aware at every point of what she does of the future that she is preparing for her painting: when she lucidly recognizes the boundless hiatus that will separate her painting from the world. And with trepidation she listens to its echo, arming herself with a visual culture – although not only this – that by way of defence she will interpose between herself and the noise of the world. As strong and as fragile as a diamond, from the very beginning of her career she already knew what she was preparing in this sense. For example, as she has confessed to Claudio Olivieri which is published at the end of this note, it is also for this reason that the destiny of her painting is always included and prefigured in her project.

It was therefore from its inception that Costantini’s painting bears on its ‘written skin’ the unreconcilable alterity for its own time. And the artist is entirely aware of this in the same way that Canova was conscious of his being out-of-date with respect to his times. So Costantini is neoclassical, armed with pride and perhaps with melancholy, something that belongs to the person who knows that he or she is acting beyond one’s own age. As Gerhard Richter was neoclassical when he painted with that Grau of his: that grey in which one could measure the sense of Man’s loss when faced by the immense and the mystery of absence. The urgency of saying another word and, at the same time, the need for a silence to which to return.

Perhaps Richter’s grey is the first image written within the code of monochrome painting which doubts its own ‘verbal’ ability. In this sense Costantini’s monochrome goes beyond Richter because once again the artist dreams that an absoluteness is possible, albeit starting out from a threshold of absolute and bitter purity. Although one cannot read and recognize her work for what it is without bearing in mind how it starts out from a mental place which lies beyond that extreme point that following Reinhardt also Richter touched. Neither can one really recognize Costantini’s painting without presuming that it always feels the effort needed from here, from moving from here, in order to once again ‘climb back up’.

It is at the summit of this ‘hill’, of this effort, that Costantini eventually finds her image (and this painting of untouchable expressive intensity has by now persisted for years: full of certainties and of an almost brazen presumption of beauty. Steadfast to existence at its every point, to its turbulence and its memories).

Its surface is woven by an only just perceptible geometrizing architecture. Although this ‘design’, almost a minimum alarm placed on the extreme limit of optical perceptibility, finally sinks to such a degree within the thrilled surface of the colour as to turn out to be nothing other than an entirely mental warning of artifice of the pictorial construction: a final bastion opposed to the fruition of the work as pure, perceptible invasion of beauty. With any other contribution light on that surface – Costantini’s true and bitter demon – is charged to erect and support these spaces invaded by silence. As if in wait, in expectation of the lengthy time of fruition.

In: Sonia Costantini, PAC, Palazzo Massari, Ferrara, December 2001

Translated by Howard Rodger MacLean