Sandra Menoia
Venetian, with a great sense of belonging to her land, Sandra Menoia was born in 1965 in San Donà di Piave in the province of Venice. Her curiosity for the expressive arts led her from a young age to become self-taught in everything related to the art of painting and especially the period of abstraction.

Fascinated by the artistic vitality of Venice, she began attending conferences as a teenager and visiting exhibitions of artists, including Venetian ones. It was precisely in this period when Sandra Menoia began to be intrigued by the painting of world-famous artists such as Emilio Vedova, Franz Kline and Jackons Pollock.

The abstract is the terrain where she loves to "get her hands dirty". Spatula of acrylic colors invade his canvases, sometimes marked, sometimes light strokes take shape in the canvas, letting out any kind of involvement, emotion and feeling. The defined leaves room for the indefinite.

It is in 2010 that she decides to make her first solo exhibition "Rapsodia di colori" in San Donà di Piave in the suggestive location of the Literary Cafe. From there, she exhibited in private and public circles participating in collective painting throughout Italy, her last solo exhibition dates back to 2019 in Cagliari at Spazio Lab14.

In the works of Sandra Menoia, form is understood as the result of the encounter between man and the world, in an alternation of empathy, or approach to reality, and abstraction, that is, rejection of it.

Her pictorial language aims to create a composition that can exist with a degree of independence from the visual references of the world.

By denying the representation of reality, she wants to privilege a moment of freedom, give vent to his imagination and, with almost childlike lightness, suggest a disenchanted look at the world.

His compositions become a set of lines, shapes and colors in which the fundamental characteristics are order, clarity, balance.

A painting made of light, pure colors, of elementary forms that are almost never attributable to traditional figures and compositions.

Eliminating any link with reality, it forces the viewer to seek only spiritual values in art.

"The pictorial production of Sandra Menoia develops on the basis of an instinctive gesture that manages in some cases to condense the conceptual strength of the image into the unity of action.

His work finds references in the various forms of contemporary abstractionism; in particular he manages to blend the material and layered painting of the informal with the incisive gestures of American abstract expressionism.

The artist expresses a singular sensitivity towards the malleable material that spreads on the surface of the canvas, developing always different results. Often the soft chromatic layers alternate with fast and decisive strokes, always guided by the emotional and instinctive feeling of color.

What the artist herself defined as the two souls of her material and conceptual painting are outlined, integral parts of a unitary research.

The material works such as Riflessi, Labirinto, Oltre il mare arise from the rapid action of the spatula strokes that are fragmented into a stratified and structured construction. The observer is invited to slowly enter the perception of the work, intent on distinguishing the different chromatic superimpositions and the densities of the material. An in-depth vision emerges between the glimmers of the artist's iterated and fragmented action towards an infinitum of sensations.

The "performative" character of Sandra Menoia's painting is expressed more clearly in the works defined as "conceptual", in which the broad and synthetic gesture becomes the protagonist, as a mirror of a direct and emotional action. The work is reduced to a lyrical and evocative synthesis between gesture and image. This is how Harmony of opposites, Chair on the sea, Saturn are born, dominated by the ability to materialize an idea through the extreme sign-gestural synthesis.

The chromatic range is reduced to the bright and dilated white of the background on which the black, red, blue, large and decisive signs often stand out, capable of condensing the iconic essence of the concept into the unity of action.

The extreme gestural synthesis of Sandra Menoia therefore acquires a particular ideographic value, suggesting to the observer possible readings and interpretations of the form dictated by the artist's free action."

Roberta Gubitosi

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