At the very beginning it is necessary to state that Nelio Sonego is a painter; a painter who is equally skilful in two, though in some segment very similar, media – painting and artist's book. In his career which spans over twenty years he has signed or co-signed forty artefacts performed in the book medium. It was via this, lately a somewhat neglected artistic field that our friendship started. Namely, last year the Rigo Gallery published the artist book entitled 3+3 by Nelio Sonego and Đanino Božić. The incentive was triggered by their long-lasting cooperation stemming from their common exhibitions and artist's books they worked on together. However, whether he chooses the medium of painting or book, Nelio Sonego's art remains consistent and recognisable. In other words Nelio Sonego has never adapted to swift changes in artistic tendencies so typical of the last two decades of the past century. Moreover, he has not even made brief appropriations of numerous innovations used to express various modes of contemporary art. Nelio Sonega's painting exists as a rare spiritual substratum which has appeared at the time when pictures (images) are reproduced technologically or electronically in an enormous number in order to have an intensive and short-lived effect, in order to be immediately transmitted and to be replaced by other new picture (images) of the same kind. This is why his painting bears no traces of such images (pictures): it seeks to superimpose existence to showing; it motivates the author and the observer alike to concentrate and, why not admit it, to contemplate. It is definitely not an easy task to continually deal with one of the oldest artistic disciplines for which decades long anticipation claims that it is doomed to die out or, at least, end up in the dustbin of art history. This is even more so if the painter has high standards of value, be it artistic, institutional or commercial. Painting simply exists and should not be defended in front of anybody, wrote Ješa Denegri. This is why stating that an artist is a painter and only a painter is completely justifiable.
What should be emphasised in Sonego's painting, or better to say, in his perception of painting, is a procedure of deconstructing the space of the artistic surface. He approaches a painting, or, more precisely, a two-dimensional surface of a smaller or larger format, not to formulate and finalize it during creative process into some solid, filled and completely plastic body. Quite the opposite, Sonego's painting is but a trace, a remnant, consequence of a specific working relationship which equally represents the very source of its meaning. Let us take, for example, paintings exhibited in the Gallery and included in this catalogue. On the surface of the canvass painted in white, irregular superposed geometrical figures are drawn vertically or horizontally with black or multicoloured acrylic spray. These forms drawn unevenly which have been created, or so it seems, very swiftly in rhythmical layering of paint (spray), vibrate, palpitate thus becoming a conveyor of the most versatile, often antithetical spiritual states of mind of the painter. In this respect it should be noted that these paintings are just "variations of the same theme" of the painter's long artistic career, in other words, they are the result of the same artistic problem Sonego has been skilfully solving: the necessity to find an adequate relationship between structure, paint and form for the gesture to receive its total value. What is at stake here is a gesture which is the result of a single decisive moment. Distinctive feature of this painting created, at first sight, from a swift single stroke, lies in seeking and finding "the right stroke born after hundreds of successive and unsuccessful ones". In effect, this is the art of painting which goes through long pauses of hesitation, which does not hide insecurity, but which knows that in the process of creating a painting there must be and will eventually come a moment when some of the layers on the canvass placed by hand will awake a painting. Or as poets might say: bring it to life in the silence of space. Hence, Sonego's painting should be interpreted primarily as a result of the creative procedure, as an effect of the action of painting, and not as an independent, self-sufficient and self-referential aesthetical object or a narrator of a story. Thus, Nelio Sonego perceives a painting as a procedure; moreover, a procedure which is more conceptual than expressive, more cognitive than existential.
Sonego's roots could be traced in the problem space of the European monochrome painting as one of the pathways and creative tendencies that appeared after and go beyond the enformel art (i.e. after 1963). One of such pathways leads towards a complete purification of the surface, towards the zero point of the painting (Yves Klein, Lucio Fontana) which leaves nothing on the surface but one (anti)colour, one tone or incision. He has also been influenced by applications of the American New Abstract Art (Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland), and also in one by sub-cultural scenes such as the art of graffiti. However, most of all, Sonego approaches the American subliminal art for which Barnett Newman offers a basis for perceiving spiritual values of painting. For better or worse, Sonego's painting appropriates not only aesthetic but ethic heritage of historical modernism as well, the heritage which has been labelled by many movements in the last several years as being worn out or surpassed. However, all these and other references are typical of the art of painting today. Painting represents a sophisticated speech and language of artistic communication which is often packed with hidden allusions on history of the painting medium, on canonical works of other artists or scenes. But most of all, it represents a specific kind of painter's individual practical reply to the basic question of ontological status of painting as a legitimate artefact. Hence, Sonego's works are layered materialisation of the painter's knowledge and doubts about what painting is and what it could become.
Jerica Ziherl