Venice, December, and at last I had an opportunity to spend time with Nelio Sonego at his studio. He picked me up from Treviso Centrale railway station, and drove me eastwards to Portogruaro, in the Veneto, where he lives and works.

And so, to an industrial estate on the outskirts of that small town.

Sonego’s studio is not only where he is busy these days, but also a repository for work that goes back to circa 1980, when he started to surface as an artist. I had the privilege of looking at paintings, sculptural pieces and works on paper that quickly got me up to speed with an aesthetic proposition that is remarkable for its constancy and clarity; above all, for its unpretentiousness. When I asked him to summarise it, he used just one word: “light”. The appearance of his work has changed over time, and been manifested in distinct series, but it always conveys a lightness of touch. This is significant, especially given the cultural milieu through which he emerged, exemplified by neo-expressionism - “Transavantguardia”, as it was known in Italy - a postmodern style of figurative painting that was predominant throughout the 1980s. It was as heavy with symbolism and self-indugence, as it was literally heavy with paint.

The chapters in Alfonso Filieri’s book, The Linear Journey of The Exemplary Vagabond, Nelio Sonego, are evocative vignettes, and one is entitled ‘The First Years of the Eighties’. It rails - maybe too much? - against the transavantgarde, against the “neo classicists, neo, neo expressionists held be neo, neo, neo thoughts, bearers on poor legs of their own corpses, filtered beings, fake dreamers of neo, neo dreams, without skeleton, nor muscles, with no blood, nor thoughts […] Only wrinkled skin of a shabby colour.” Sonego, on the other hand, had eyes that were “the colour of the spaces of silence and looked to the speed of thought.”[1]

Sonego, for Filieri, personifies lightness. He was and still is a traveller, travelling lightly; hence “an exemplary vagabond”. Filieri’s book is both a testament of affection for the artist - a kind of love letter - and an elliptical expression of artistic affinity. When Sonego sets forth “with pure steps and a real mind honesty, in spite of the ever present uncertainty of the future for the natural aptitude of being always with him, away from fashions …”, Filieri is there too. In Venice, in the early 80s “in golden sunlightt days [together they were] walking among streets, canals talking about art, exhibitions […] on an absurd swaying of life and death, where the brilliant glow of golden fluid water on the houses and on everything else seemed so uncertain, as much as definitive.”[2]

Light was all around.

In Portogruaro, more than forty years later, it shone on me. Nelio Sonego is a charismatic type, often smiling. He is philosophical, but not theoretically overbearing, and his work is very much in keeping with his temperament, at once restrained and open, uncontrived. It is abstract but not transcendentally so, and to elucidate he draws a comparison between his work and that of Lucio Fontana. The latter, Sonego explains, had an extraterrestrial ambition - “he wanted to conquer the moon, to make journeys into space”[3] - whereas he is centred on what it is to be human.

Filieri’s observation that Sonego’s journey was “away from fashions” is nicely borne out by the fact that, as a young artist, he went in a direction diametrically opposite to that taken by many of his peers. In the mid-1970s, Sonego was making figurative paintings - sometimes with biblical subjects - before he started to shift stylistically, and surely, towards his Strutturali series (from 1979) which essentially comprises configurations of drawn straight lines on canvas. This is precisely the kind of minimalism that was eschewed by the mainstream (postmodern) art world during the 1980s. And Sonego persisted, next embarking on a series entitled Rettangolare Verticale (from 1982) that, more often than not, featured lines sparsely drawn without the aid of a ruler.

The figures may have departed, but Sonego’s works of the early 1980s refer to a man-made world. Straight lines and rectangles signify built environments and, when talking about the Strutturali series, Sonego likens individual pieces to city plans or maps. They have the vocabulary of technical drawings, such as are made by architects.The Rettangolare Verticale works, on the other hand, often with a kind of doodling made in relation to upright oblongs - corresponding to their “portrait” formats - graphically suggest movement within and around doorways.

And then, as he edged towards the 1990s, there were triangles and disembodied angles - the Trisangeli and Angoarceli series, respectively - through which we see Sonego becoming increasingly free with brushstrokes of acrylic paint on canvas. Early on, during my studio visit, I had been wondering if the Strutturali series was systematic a là François Morellet - in other words, aspiring to a negation of individualistic expression - but this was obviously not right. Sonego explains that all his work is at once “regular and not regular”[4], on a spectrum between deliberation and improvisation. He starts out with a formal idea and then lets go: “I know only what I will do first. After that I don’t know.”[5] He is not, and never has been, a mathematical artist.

And so, to the other end of the spectrum. The Angoarceli works have a calligraphic quality and thus beg the zen question, but Sonego is emphatic. He does not want us to imagine that we are in some spiritual realm.

During the years in which he was developing the Angoarceli series - more or less, the 1990s - when his brushstrokes were furthest from regular geometry, Sonego was explicitly allying himself with the visionary poet Carlo Invernizzi, to the extent that, in 1996, he and a number of other artists came together with Invernizzi and signed an artistic manifesto: Tromboloide e disquarciata. The title might be a repudiation - can any English translation do it justice? - but the manifesto itself is more positive, wholistic in its assertion of the interdependence of the human body and the mind. It is reminiscent of William Blake’s prophetic writing:

Man, by his physical constitution, is an intrinsic part of Natura Naturans . His thought (mind) and his body (brain) are biologically connected in one. His mind-body whole is the space-time of his becoming between birth and death. Art (poetry) is the noetic anxiety of the Natura Naturans man in the rupture of the all-nothing […] Art (poetry) inventing itself becomes language. Consciousness is only its instrument. The result is the form-image that identifies the invention. Man rediscovers his limit. Art (poetry) is its own programme that is its end, the tautological necessity of its closing-opening in revealing itself. The artist's (the poet's) creation is instinct and pleasure, it does not depend on his will, but on necessity-freedom.[6]

Invernizzi wrote about Sonego’s Angoarcoli works in a catalogue essay for an exhibition in 2002. They exemplify the manifesto, he explained, being “energetic forms/images that concretely occur in a sudden impulse of bodyhandarmbrainmind, incorporating the spatiotemporal physicalness of its own constituent elements into a unicum.”[7] Like Filieri, Invernizzi expresses his admiration for Sonego’s resistance to fashion, and uses the analogy of a solitary journey when reflecting on his artistic achievement, albeit with more cosmic overtones : “This is a road [different from most others] that Sonego has followed steadfastly for over twenty years, his gaze always directed towards the abysses of the universe emptyallnothing, experiencing wonder as he intuitively feels himself to be an intrinsic participant in the perception of the interactions of forces that, in their visionariness, occur in the poetic luminosity of the images of his paintings …”[8]

Five years later, that road led to the Villa Pisani, a Renaissance villa in the Veneto designed by Andrea Palladio, built in the 1540s. Sonego had been invited to exhibit his work there, significantly alongside that of French artist Michel Verjux. In the words of the curator, Francesca Pola, Sonego and Verjux were “to have a direct and active relationship with both the architectural spaces and the historical memory of this Palladian building, as well as being closely involved in a reciprocal dialogue”. Verjux, incidentally another artist championed by Invernizzi, is renowned for his use of light as a medium. At the Villa Pisani, he shone light - as éclairages - in circles and semicircles onto walls, inside and out, keyed into Palladio’s geometry. Context is everything for Verjux, and the experience of his work is determined by its circumstances, including changing light conditions due to weather and times of day. His projections onto the external walls of the villa became more stark as the daylight faded, and after one clear night, he wrote a diary entry that describes the appearance of the moon: “[forming] an integral part of what is here before our eyes, just like the sky, the half-urban/half-rural horizon and the rest of the landscape”.[9]

Sonego’s work, on the other hand, is not site-specific - “quite independent in conception”, as he puts it[10] - but on this occasion he found himself responding to the “architectual power” of Villa Pisani, in a way that was very much in keeping with the 1996 manifesto. In an artist’s statement, published in the exhibition catalogue, he explained that, like Palladio, he proceeds from “plans”: “rhythms […] based on a concept arrived at earlier than their actual making, in the sense that my work is born in my mind and is formed unexpectedly by concrete yet controlled marks … my painting is an obsession that comes into being, an energy that explodes and expresses itself on the canvas.”[11]

Rather than literally conforming with the architecture, as Verjux did, Sonego used it as a foil. In contrast to Palladio’s straight lines, regular shapes and muted hues, Sonego’s brightly coloured spray paintings bear linear traces of his physical movements - in “sudden impulses of bodyhandarmbrainmind” -

across canvas. All those exhibited at Villa Pisani are from his ongoing Orizzontaleverticale series (started in 2003), works variously reiterating their rectangular formats. These in turn reiterated the rectangularity of their architectural setting.

One of these paintings, more than five metres long, was hung above the main entrance of the villa. With an unambiguous nod to his earlier Rettangolare Verticale “doorways”, yellow, blue, green and red hand drawn rectangles coincide, with a rhythmic spacing of their vertical lines occurring between two shared horizontals. Below there is another composition of rectangles, namely the large double doors with windows on either side, each with their own rectangular framing and internal structures. Natural light streamed through this geometry as well as the windows above, during the day, to combine with the poetic luminosity that Sonego achieves, and, in this way, his work was playing off that of Palladio.

The Orizzontaleverticale series comprises paintings not only of closed rectangles, where all sides are met at corners, but also unfinished rectangles with vertical lines that connect arcing “horizontals” bleeding off the right-hand edge of the canvas. They brim with energy. In the studio, when I asked him why he makes these works, Sonego replied that he wants the viewer to imagine the sweeping lines continuing beyond the confines of the art object - the painting on canvas - “to go out, to go on and on”.

“To go out, to go on and on”. This could be the motto of the exemplary vagabond.

* * *

It was time for me to get back to Venice, but before my train and before it got too dark, Sonego insisted on taking me for a walk through Portogruaro. There we saw architecture that is typical of a town in the Veneto: the church, the old art gallery, the shops and cafes. Lots of geometry, not all of it regular. There was a team of men with a crane stretching cables (lines, horizontal) from poles (vertical) across the high street. Sonego, in his friendly way, asked them what they were doing, and their answer could not have been more pertinent. Poetic, even. They were putting up Christmas lights.

[1] Alfonso Filieri’s, The Linear Journey of The Exemplary Vagabond, Nelio Sonego,, Orolontano Association, Rome 2009, p.33

[2] Ibid. pp.33-34

[3] Unpublished conversation with the author, December 2024

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Carlo Invernizzi, Secretizie, Edizioni Poìesis, Morterone 2012, p .126

[7] Carlo Invernizzi, ‘Nelio Sonego’s Creation of Painting and the Occurrence in Concrete Images of his mental Spacetime’, Nelio Sonego, exhibition catalogue published on the occasion of the Bologna Art Fair, A arte Studio Invernizzi, Milan 2002, unpaginated. Another essay, written by Francesco Tedeschi around this time, is in the same vein: ‘Nelio Sonego. Angoarcoli’, Nelio Sonego, exhibition catalogue, A arte Studio Invernizzi, Milan 2001, pp. 7-9

[8] Ibid.

[9] Michael Verjux, ‘Répliques, in response to a Palladian villa, its site and the moon’, Nelio Sonego, Michel Verjux, Villa Pisani Bonetti, Bagnolo di Longo 2007, p.44

[10] Nelio Sonego, ‘Working at Villa Pisani’, Nelio Sonego, Michel Verjux, Op. cit. p.32

[11] Ibid. p.32