Valentina Sonzogni dwells in the landscapes of the Gulf of Lugano and Gandria and draws an intimate experience from them. The tension between water and earth, the bichromatic polarization, the language with its metaphysical nuances, encourage symbolic revelation. The lake and the mountains, their shapes, surfaces, edges and roundness discreetly evoke the female body.
"The landscape that emerges, essential, in Valentina Sonzogni's defined contours and softly nuanced colours, is an intimate landscape. The human element is apparently absent: it is the earth that emerges in all its delicate, static, power. Yet it is a mother-earth, a fertile and feminine land. Mountains occupy the canvas, stylized monoliths, whose insistent profile suggests alluring curves of woman, now charged with character and earthly matter, now, in negative in the void of the canvas, silently sensual.
On the cotton of the canvases, the artist synthesizes shapes and colors of a conceptual landscape, where the horizontality of the celestial and ochre waters contrasts with the steep, monochrome peaks. She builds her poetics with the intention of telling the relationship between woman and nature, the link with blood and earth, with the lymph of the world. The true measure of space is femininity.
So she embraces and gives us back from a new perspective the earth-organism, theorized in a well-known passage from Leonardo Da Vinci: "So we could say that the earth has a vegetative soul, and that its flesh is the earth, its bones are the orders of the stones of which the mountains are composed, its tenderness are the tuffs, its blood are the veins of the waters; the lake of blood, which is around the core, is the ocean sea; its breath [...] is the flow and echo of the sea; [...]". (Leicester Code, f. 34r), where rivers are the veins of the earth and water is the blood that flows in them. Symbol of the origins and metaphor of motherhood, "intimately connected with the lunar femininity" (Jung 1955 - 1956), water remains an element significantly sought after by Sonzogni in the relationship between the original source and her own femininity (Del Guercio, 2015). Here is the Ceresium, in its chromatic variations, the impalpable amniotic liquid, fertile source of life, from which the genesis of a world before time springs.
The artist draws on the work of Gina Pane, from which he recovers the sincere dialogue with nature. Among the original characteristics of her way of working, there is the composition of pigments with organic matter, vital and innate to the creative principle: water colors, graphite and blood. Sonzogni avoids provocation: "blood is no longer the result of a wound and becomes a binder again" (Spoldi, 2014). From the body back to the canvas, from the earth to the drawing. She uses irony, synthesis, simplicity of gestures - the hand that cuts and sews with patience - marginal practices that reveal in a whisper, with small and delicate fragments of everyday life, the most sensitive aspects of femininity, in its contradictions.
The large canvases and small watercolours, together with the preliminary drawings, were created during a residency at Five Gallery, where the artist lived between 2014 and 2015, living in the Gallery and its terrace, like a studio" (Finadri, 2019).
