A review by Elena Gollini

Samantha Boni possesses a small spark of sparkling genius, which inflames her heart, illuminates her mind and allows her to translate her inner sensations and perceptions into something personal and exclusive, bringing it back to her canvases in a new and sui generis way. Her creative strength lies in her ability to know how to be moved by those things and situations of our everyday life, which few people in this age of aphonia and extreme superficiality of feelings and emotions, still know how to appreciate and express. Digging into the recondite and hidden recesses of memory, she lets all of herself emerge and is guided by pure, uncontaminated and unconditional inspiration. Colours, shapes, signs and figures come to the surface and compose a dense pictorial material, pregnant with substantial meanings inherent in the compositions. The studies and skills acquired in the field are in perfect synergy with a lively and dynamic flair. The works pulsate with life, dynamism, movement and vital flow and envelop the spectator in a scenario where he can freely give his own interpretation, interpretative, using heterogeneous and always new keys, in a communicative language that is never predictable, never banal and never repetitive. Samantha simply tells us that art is nothing more than magic and serves to make us rediscover our true face and our true essence. “What art seeks to destroy is the monotony of type, the slavery of fashion, the tyranny of habits and the lowering of man to the level of the machine” (Oscar Wilde).

Samantha’s artistic experience moves and develops in line with this authoritative quotation, proposing a painting with a variegated imprint, inspired by an informal evocative formula, which escapes from the dogmatic canons perpetrated by the most rigid, iron and intransigent tradition, with a standardised and conventional approach. She takes refuge in an expressive niche of peculiar and exclusive distinctive connotation and carves out a communicative language of her own, codified and rich in underlying messages and subliminal and metaphorical symbologies. Samantha is the creator of a pictorial orchestration that retrieves and reproduces scenarios between dream and metaphor, reality and fantasy, the real and the unreal, where the ironic and fantastic component and the spirit of invention feed the imaginary sphere and offer the spectator multiple points of interpretation, facilitating and encouraging the direct interpenetration of the viewer. This compositional formula gradually takes on reflections, contours and references of delicate and gentle poetic lyricism and inserts the representations within a noble and rarefied dimension without time or space, which allows them to escape from the circumscribed limits of the picture surface and provides a two-dimensional perspective view with a plastic and dilated full-field effect.

Samantha never uses a redundant and slavishly emulative structural module. She devises a lively, original elaboration that always manages to surprise and arouse curiosity, and is a way out and a way of overcoming a descriptive realism that is often asphyxiated and an end in itself, conceived as a mere cold and photographic reproduction, devoid of substantial content. He deliberately avoids those real visions and atmospheres that have lost and exhausted their evocative and contemplative capacity of representation. His research is based on the categorical and conscious refusal of a style made up of standardised stereo types, of factors and elements that have already been cleared through customs and inflated as clichés, proposing painting understood as research work and experimental study on drawing and colour, on tonal combinations with light and luminous effects and on particular figurative combinations of abstract tendency. The selection of subjects and themes is mediated and influenced by a strong component of passion and emotional transport, which goes beyond mass collective paradigms and pushes on to projections of particular subjective value. The paintings are detached from the immediate and visible aesthetic reality and are dominated by the skilful play of colours, by a chromatic palette chosen and selected with the utmost care and attention, which produces enchanting and virtuous combinations and declinations, accentuating the visionary suggestion  and imaginative whole. In Samantha’s pictorial universe, important existential themes emerge and come to life, hidden in the folds of the material, to be shared with the viewer and of which she is a convinced spokesperson and fervent divulger and promoter through her art. The figurations she creates constitute archetypes with an important and pregnant intrinsic symbolic value and are never the result of a casual and improvised execution. She perceives the primary need and the pressing necessity to establish and consolidate an effective and functional virtual communication through the works, to speak and communicate through them, in an attempt to understand and interpret the surrounding world, relating to and confronting the viewer in a direct and spontaneous way. Painting becomes an attempt to give concrete form and voice, with visible and tangible form, to the word and to the open and free conversation, with which thoughts, feelings and perceptions leak out, allowing her to make an accurate, probing and in-depth reflection on the entire history of art, on the meaning of being and of existing and on the meaning itself of the artist’s profession and her role as a woman-artist in the current and contemporary world.

For Samantha, being a painter does not mean entering into a preconceived and preconfigured system, but rather putting herself in front of it and coming out with genuine authenticity, exposing herself completely and laying herself bare in her innermost depths of the soul and of one’s introspective sphere. A painting may fascinate and attract for aesthetic purposes, but it still has its own relevant specific weight and peculiar hidden spiritual content to communicate and convey to the observer. There are artists whose creations appear to be the result of a profoundly intimate dialogue between their conscience and their unconscious, without, however, in any way overshadowing or obscuring the parameters of their fundamental pictorial values.

When the aesthetic element and factor and the spiritual and inner one combine, join and merge in synergistic and harmonious cohesion, they express the very soul of the artist and this is what happens in Samantha’s paintings, where it is impossible to separate and separate these two components, milestones of her art making. A multifaceted artist, she is gifted with lively talent and engaging creative ideas, as well as a deep-rooted technical and instrumental maturity in design and execution, she paints by focusing on narratives with a gentle, refined and refined taste, which possess an exquisite scenic elegance and a balanced structural balance, which never exceeds in exaggerated artifices and exasperated and sophisticated machinations. Her painting translates into a vortex of stimuli and solicitations in a perfect alchemical mixture, in vibrant impulses that flow together and place her far from expressive dynamics that are purely exhibitionistic, delving into the meanders of the ego. In some ways it can be compared to that part of twentieth-century European art which digs and probes inside the pictorial matter, in the constant search for a “biological and psychological truth” that guarantees the work a full and complete content. The poetic pursued exalts the communicative power of the tonal range to the full, with the use of incisive colours that fill the entire representation with energetic vibrations and produce a continuous and constant, fluid and flowing sense of dynamic movement that pervades and permeates the entire composition. The colours are used in a skilful and always well measured way, generate a special choreographic allure and best highlight the depth of the evocative images.

The stimulating revisitations take the form of “scans” of vital and existential fragments imprinted on the canvases with a masterly texture. Each space becomes a piece of Samantha’s life, revealed in its uniqueness. The spectator is drawn into the narrative and made to participate with a sensory afflatus of intense pathos and transport. The works guard the unspoken and the unrevealed, all to be discovered, and are the synthesis of her modus vivendi and pensandi. They capture the eye and conquer it with a persuasive charm, which preserves a semantic language synonymous with a cultured art with an intellectual flavour, which lives and feeds on full and dense substance and not on mere fictitious, empty and superficial appearances. The images attract attention with stimulating curiosity and are the personification of a soul in their perpetual and ethereal motion, acquiring an articulated and multifaceted iconic meaning on several keys and paradigms of interpretation. The bewitching and charismatic power that is released is the result of the gesture and the creative act of Samantha in a continuous inspirational becoming, in the moment of the “here and now” and reveals a witty and subtle psychological analysis carried out upstream in the ideational phase, which reveals her strong intuitive and perceptive sensitivity. His work can be framed as the allusive transcendence of a figurative painting of testimony, which from the experience of everyday life and living moves and rises to another level, to a higher plane, ethereal in its ascetic ideal of a search for mental and interior well-being and satisfaction. In the magnetic interweaving of forces and energetic propulsions, multiple possibilities for active interaction sprout and open up, conveying the spectator into a circuit full of meanings and inherent messages. Each component refers to components and connections on several levels of cognition, which Samantha identifies with painstaking precision, managing to achieve a high level of quality, which extends to the entire production, channelling also the imaginative element that is a fundamental support to grasp and understand what is hidden and concealed from the immediate visible. Without the invaluable contribution of the imaginative visionary, one could not see the substantial overall scope in totus. Imagination contributes to giving the viewer’s receptive capacity a powerful boost and acts as a driving force in the approach to the work. “Painting is first and foremost a product of the imagination, it must never be a copy. The air you see in paintings is not breathable” (Edgar Degas). The sign that distinguishes, qualifies and validates true and authentic art is determined by communicativeness and communicative potential. In line with these coherent positions, Samantha’s flourishing artistic production infuses and imprints a positive message in favour of art and culture in general, urging us to approach it with the measure of intellect combined with emotional sensitivity.

For Samantha, the artist must operate with extreme consistency of purpose and intentions, and must demonstrate moral ethics and intellectual honesty, performing a social function of mediation and intermediation and acting with sincere profusion of feeling. Only in this way can it become worthy of consideration and appreciation and enjoy effective public approval and feedback.

“When a man, without exerting any action on himself and without anything else intervening to modify his spiritual condition, but only by reading, listening to, or contemplating the work of another man, enters into a state of mind which unites him with the latter, then surely the work which has provoked such a state of mind belongs to art.

(Lev Tolstoy).