The Art of Silvia Martignago

Maurizia Borsato | Art History – communication – content writer

Silvia Martignago’s artistic production can be divided into three main themes: landscapes, flowers, and roses.

The landscapes are dedicated to the “places of the heart.” Although each is unique—always different from the others—they all share three recurring features, the stylistic hallmark of Martignago’s work. First, her choice to give equal breadth to the depiction of land and sky. This balance grants her paintings a deep sense of harmony and serenity. Second, her deeply personal and subjective use of color, which is the true protagonist of her art: through careful saturation and juxtaposition, the colors enhance one another, generating a natural luminosity that transforms places into emotions. Finally, the material quality of her technique: while Martignago uses brushes, she also employs palette knives to spread the paint across the canvas, creating real accumulations of matter. As these solidify, they give rise to new dimensions on the surface, projecting a play of light and shadow. Thus, the viewer feels as though they could touch the blades of grass in her vast fields or brush the foam of Silvia Martignago’s waves.

Through her representations of flowers—rendered in detailed, magnified depictions—the artist invites the viewer to pause and appreciate the forms, the number of stamens, and the subtle gradations of the petals. These enlarged portrayals aim to reawaken our eyes, to draw them away from indifference. Silvia’s flowers are an invitation to move from a distracted, superficial gaze to a slow, conscious, and admiring observation of the natural elements that surround us and their beauty.

Finally, with her Roses, Silvia Martignago creates art that can be lived in and lived with. Her roses can enter our homes not only as works of art but also as decorative elements and symbols—of elegance, love, tenderness, or friendship, depending on their color. The tactile materiality that characterizes all of Martignago’s works reaches its peak here, to the point that her Roses can be described as high reliefs—artworks in which the boundary between painting and sculpture is broken.

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Transcends reality to create pure emotion

Mario Guderzo | Director of the Antonio Canova Gypsotheca Museum, Possagno

When confronted with the works of Silvia Martignago one is immediately engaged by a vision of rich colors of great intensity and richness of tone which, however, does not prevent us to grasp the character that sets her apart: being, that is, an artist who is totally immersed in the profound heritage of the art of the Veneto region. She is deeply convinced that she can express herself in totality, because the foundation on which she roots her thoughts and action must be able to tell the "truth", the whole truth of her soul. In this manner, as is this case for other expressions of human action, the art of Silvia Martignago has a fundamental mission, to excite and transmit a message rich in positivity.

Hers is a "natural" painting, comprising deep expressive signs that transmit emotion, but emotion in its purest form. It teaches us that the search for beauty in everyday things undoubtedly helps us live better. All this appears clearly from this new cycle where she demonstrates an extraordinary creative vitality, almost as if to emphasize that «the art - as held by George Sand - is not a study of positive reality, it is the seeking for ideal truth». A journey of reflection, therefore, a sort of narrative, like a reporter following an emotional itinerary; an apparent expressive memory of a past life and a way to live the present. This is how Silvia Martignago can say that painting, full of vivid and vibrant colours, gives strength to the "narration" of the canvas.

This is how Silvia Martignago lets us into her world and thanks to her skillful technique, in which material and colour prevail, where both these elements, pictorial technique and material, ensure that the light is absorbed, as if it were the object itself to attract it.

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Painting while observing the beauty of nature

Lucia Majer | Art Critic, Venezia

"Painting to me is a deep passion". With these simple words, Silvia Martignago is introducing herself and at the same time she introduces us to her paintings, and it’s this passion to keep her far from the ephemeral glamour of the trends, and to drive her style to deep values instead. Silvia is convinced that art should bring serenity and facilitate dialogue and communication with others. Her painting is totally immersed into the nature. Nature is not portrayed in an analytic and meticolous way, but it is represented with a “impressionist” style, which is capable of revealing its own essence, capturing its hidden sounds and its most intimate vibrations. The artist immerses herself so deep into it that she can express nature through the same materials that it is made of: the light and the color.