MÓNICA CANZIO
“Sensitive matter” – March 2018
When in painting, as in any other activity, it is said that someone “is a professional”, it is presumed that someone knows, and dominates, the secrets and labyrinths of the craft, and that exercises it with skill and resources. But also in the word craft the presence of a strong materiality resonates, there where the craft implies involvement in physical work itself.
Mónica Canzio reveals as strictly suitable in both meanings: her painting is solid and decisive, with formal resolutions of a tight rigor in the assembly of carnal fillings that seem to exude a humidity of freshly painted, injecting porosity in the proportionate internal cohesion of painting. Alert to the chromatic relations of a very elaborate and subtle palette, and to the dynamic counterpoints of the well-tempered partition of the plane, Canzio lets the painting grow and breath showing herself with her body made with strokes of a spatula and not from a brush, as if they were reconstructing, under the shape of silent geometric poems, the atavistic residues of colorful stucco and plaster, of calcareous surfaces that recall the palpitation of the fresco, of worn walls in the outdoor, while a fragmentary reflection of the informalist stony aridity resonates in the lyrical roughness of fabrics and papers.
Canzio’s language, as compact and laconic as it is voluptuous and pregnant, invites in each canvas to familiarize with the magnetic effect of density and turgidity of the pigment, applied in rhythmic crossings, passages and superimpositions. The overall result could be seen as a series of essays about the conciliation, and the conflict, between the drive energy and the pragmatic exercise, that bifrontal phenomenon that is part of the compositional mechanics. The artist assumes it in a clear adherence to classical abstraction, delivering the emotional factor in sustained raptures of limpid pictorial sensoriality incontinently bursting into the general orchestration, and in the details of the brittle modulation of scars, splashes traces and cracks that seem to strain the apparent serenity of the whole.
After an extended career that has shown her mainly as a sculptress and designer, Mónica Canzio returns with firm arguments to the disputed territory of painting, and in doing so it remains fanatically aware of the character of the materials she uses. Just as her perception and permeability led her to the cult of the spirit of glass and ancient objects as the raw material for her three-dimensional inventions, now she immerses herself i the substances of oil and extracts from them a kind of primordial clay to model the tremulous tactile surfaces of this strange flat pottery, as if the multifaceted impulse of its manual and intellectual archive had given rise to the new, unexpected physiognomy of a single, essential organism.
EDUARDO STUPÍA
Febrero 2018