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Yarns and Material like Colour
In
1982 her already continuous research on textiles
prompted Marialuisa Sponga to experiment and start a
process of manipulation: textile no longer seen as a
two-dimensional surface but a three-dimensional form
with folds, burns, scales and fraying. Subsequently, continuing
on this type of research, she began to delve into other materials:
plastic, metal, yarn, flock, rope, mesh and everything which
allowed a needle through it.
During this course, all her experiences intertwined, overlapped
and interacted
giving sensations and provoking emotions. As a tool she uses
a sewing machine
in a nique way. She moves her compositions freely beneath
the needle with
transparent, metallic or coloured threads according to the
effect or the embroidery
to achieve, which is decisive for the final result. The works
of Marialuisa Sponga,
created with the quilting and modern embroidery assemblage
technique, have a
particular autonomous language for the rare use of different
materials and of their
colours.
On meeting her in her studio, one is struck by her creative
enthusiasm and
by her knowledge on assemblage. The breaking of rules revive
her planning
logic which determines her style and one appreciates the personality
that reveals
itself capable of transmitting manifold sensations. Marialuisa
Sponga usually
creates uncommon-sized works such as the maps of the "Paths
of Infinity"
where the vastness of the territory is highlighted. This work
is articulated in 4 X
1.85 metres in height triptychs. The use of vigorously coloured
material elements
and interventions using copper threads on which gauze or three-dimensional
copper cloth or else transparent cellophane overlap, provoke
translucent
effects which reflect and capture the light creating other
results which interact
with the whole.
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Even
before seeing, she feels.
Her works have tactile references even before visual ones. No
debt to painting: or rather, Marialuisa Sponga manages to enter
the fibre, the structure and only from that moment does she
re-emerge with the form suggested to her from the material itself.
The most suitable term to describe her work of excavation is
de-structuring and re-structuring. In fact, how could one describe
that process which brings you to separate the texture which
is lucid, from the warp which is opaque, to reveal the beauty
of the undulation incurred during the weaving stages?
Here therefore is the first stage of Marialuisa's course. Disassembling,
observing, understanding how things are made. From this moment
on creation sets off, a free act, which demolishes the rules
of necessity to lead us into her infinity. Her infinity is abstract
but not empty, full as it is of lines, revelations, of boundless
stretches and small recesses, and in fact one of the themes
on which she has worked on mostly is landscape. Here we also
find the same process: a journey, exploration, her continuous
surprise in new scenarios and then, at home, settlement. I like
to think of Marialuisa in the repetition of movements as old
as weaving: in her disassembling she goes back into history,
leaving all knowledge behind her, starting from the beginning,
setting off from within herself and from her encounter with
things, always new. A freedom acquired with tenacity after years
of work with Marina Giannangeli who inspired her to combine
heterogeneous materials, the use of natural dyes with Rosella
Cilano and the use of felt with Helga and Lise Schwabl.
These are the techniques which are very much defamed by many
of the
avant-garde, but it is precisely this uninterrupted practise
which liberates her mind and qualifies the material presented
so extremely precious, regal and bright. Totally within modernity,
Marialuisa does not accept its destructive and opaque results
and she has the courage of someone who, nonetheless, simply
wishes to reply with a smile to the question of feeling.
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| Gabriella
Anedi de Simone |
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® since 2002, Marialuisa Sponga all rights reserved
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