Mónica Canzio
Materia Sensible
March 14 to May 9, 2018
Curator: Eduardo Stupía
Curatorial text
When in painting, as in any other activity, it is said that someone “has a trade”, the noun immediately becomes an adjective. It is presumed that this someone knows, and masters, the secrets and labyrinths of the medium, and that he exercises the practice at least with skill and resources. But also in the word office the presence of a strong materiality resonates, where office implies involvement in physical work itself.
Mónica Canzio is revealed to be strictly suitable in both meanings: her painting is of solid and determined concretion, with formal resolutions of a tight rigor in the assembly of carnal impastoes that seem to exude a freshly painted humidity, injecting porosity into the proportionate internal cohesion of the chart. Alert to the chromatic relationships 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 breathe, showing itself with its body made with strokes of a spatula and not a brush, as if the atavistic residues of colorful stuccoes and plasters, of calcareous surfaces that recall the palpitation of the fresco, of walls worn to the elements, were reconstructed in the form of silent geometric poems, while a fragmentary reflection of the stony informalist aridity resonates in the lyrical roughness of fabrics and papers.
Canzio’s language, as compact and laconic as it is voluptuous and pregnant, invites us in each canvas to become familiar with the magnetic effect of density and turgor of the pigment, applied in rhythmic crossings, passages and superpositions.
The overall result could be seen as a series of essays on the conciliation, and conflict, between instinctual energy and programmatic exercise, that two-sided phenomenon that is part of the compositional mechanics. The artist assumes this in a clear adherence to classical abstraction, delivering the emotional factor in sustained raptures of limpid pictorial sensoriality breaking incontinently into the general orchestration, and in the details of the brittle modulation of scars, splashes, strokes and cracks that seem to twitch. the apparent serenity of everything.
After an extended career that has seen her mostly as a sculptor and designer, Mónica Canzio returns with strong arguments to the disputed territory of painting, and in doing so 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 raw material for her three-dimensional inventions, she now immerses herself in 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
January, 2018
