CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

The recently undertaken aesthetic language brings together photography, printmaking, and painting into a single unified whole—elements that are functional to Anna Montanaro's poetics. They embody memory in its confused, fragmented, and fragmentary state; memory, in its romanticism and gentleness, is preserved and carried into the present.

This is an introspective exploration of images drawn from the artist's unconscious, which, time after time, emerge from the canvas like memories trapped within recollection. An image that at times appears blurred and at others sharply defined, in which objects, figures, and forms intertwine, giving rise to a dreamlike narrative.

The technique employed is deliberately ephemeral and latent, aimed at emphasizing narration and engaging the viewer in the search for elements with which they may resonate. Scratches and continuous layers alternate, creating a multi-stratified process that builds depth within the narrative, "stratifying and sedimenting" the image, thereby fixing it in time.

— Giorgio Gregorio Grasso, Art Historian and Art Critic

Anna Montanaro succeeds in bringing together multiple techniques, multiple philosophies, and multiple artistic and aesthetic languages to create a work that cannot be defined in any way other than as a personal work by Anna Montanaro.

Appunti di viaggio represents India, although the hope is that the project will be expanded to other countries. Anna Montanaro's work is emotionally engaging: it allows the viewer to experience a reality they did not expect, drawing them into a magical world they could not have imagined.

The true strength of Anna Montanaro's practice—rooted in painting—in this case lies in recognizability, which is extremely difficult to achieve in photography and represents one of the most significant accomplishments of an artist.

As you will see, each work carries its own narrative, each work conveys its own message, each work seeks to express something. In reality, these are "Appunti di viaggio" (Travel Notes), yet they are not simply travel notes, because Anna represents humanity as a whole, the philosophy of life, and the philosophy of civilization. Therefore, her work goes far beyond the meaning that a title—by its very nature reductive—might attempt to contain.

— Giorgio Gregorio Grasso, Art Historian and Art Critic

The mixed-media works of Anna Montanaro, grounded in memories that transform into emotional matter and subsequently into symbol, explore external scenes—such as dance—with the same intensity as an intimate and inner dimension, such as parenthood. From this emerges a visual language in which the boundary between "inside" and "outside" progressively dissolves, until it affirms a unified condition of being: "We are one."

— Kornelija Koneska, art critic and director of the Osten Biennial of Drawing and Osten Cartoon.

The numerous symbols, alongside concrete images in digital elaborations, enable Anna Montanaro to construct works developed across different planes and perspectival levels, which may evoke childhood fantasies and memories or existing visual glimpses.

Viewers are invited to undertake a "journey" between the real and the unreal, within a dialectical interplay superimposed on universal everyday needs, "shared by all," such as water. The painter, at times, tends to fill voids, bringing together forms, objects, and people, seeking to involve the audience in a process of introspection and analysis. The juxtaposition and alternation—between graphic aspects and tones, between light and shadow—render the represented visions richly elaborate and sumptuous.

— from Nuova Arte: Rassegna di artisti e partecipanti al Premio Arte 2015–2016, Cairo Editore, p. 32.

The Maestro Anna Montanaro was born in Carate Brianza and, at the age of eleven, already attended the F.A.L. Free Art Academy. After graduating from the Pio XI Art High School in Desio, under the guidance of Marcello Maloberti and Giampiero Moioli, she enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, specializing in Art Restoration. She first trained in the restoration of 16th- and 17th-century canvas and panel paintings at the PDM Institute in Prato, and later in the restoration of frescoes and surface stucco work with Giuseppina Suardi and Elena Gigliarelli at the Accademia Dedalo in Brescia. She subsequently assisted Professor Luciana Biliotti in the course on ancient painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Among her recognitions, we recall the recent award for Graphic Art at OSTEN – Biennial of Drawing 2022 in Skopje (Macedonia).

Tender faces appear—patient children; attentive and curious, they lie upon a dark surface, a photographic shot with vintage tones; at the center, toy bears with wide, glassy eyes.

The work of Anna Montanaro presents itself as a revelatory investigation of a lost emotional resonance. An apparent kaleidoscopic repetition of the same child, the pure soul of the depicted subject, a crossroads of numerous instants of existence, escapes the viewer's gaze. So much sweetness, innocent eyes, so much strength still in the gesture of outstretched hands—tools of making as well as of greeting.

They manifest fears, anxieties resting in the heart; they search for hope, for awaited love. In their busyness, their dilated moment halts the sudden abandonment of the fluttering wing.

Like a carpet of games, almost a waiting room, the scene softens and absorbs melancholic sobs; early sufferers find a semblance of warmth and tranquility. The teddy bears smile, listen—without words, yet radiating understanding and affection. Guardians of sweet and bitter memories, to them the children, nostalgic custodians, reveal their mute stories, and they, attentive confidants, gradually dissolve the knot of pain.

Realism is granted by photography, while paint and resin overflow with a romantic touch: Montanaro's Dadaist photomontage, far from sterile experimentation in sentimentality, becomes an anchor of connection.

Patiens fuses into a single narrative the aura of life's tragedy and trust in the future, while its woven textures form a tapestry of loving empathy.

— Stefania Pieralice, V Catalog of the Triennial of Visual Arts in Rome "The Poetics of Differences", pp. 180–181, 2023.

Her painterly images, in which fin-de-siècle dreams, sensitive tonal harmonies, and the failed fairy tales of our time gravitate, reveal Anna Montanaro as an artist of the present—entirely figurative and grounded in reality—who incorporates her new narrative dimension and fully inhabits its scope.

She has emerged through significant national recognition due to her distinction, as she allows modernity and tradition to coexist within her practice.

— Carlo Franza, international critic of modern and contemporary art

Anna Montanaro works on the image and on materials that become the primary structure of the subject. In her scratched painting practice, tones, colours, and brushstrokes overlap in a delicate yet decisive manner, giving depth and a richness of visual planes that gradually reveal themselves to the viewer's eye.

Her is a refined art, rich in conceptual cues, in which the mask, the double, the reflection, and transparency take on an ideal and mental significance.

— Guido Folco, Director of the MIIT Museum and founder of the international magazine Italia Arte. 

Artistic expression is the result of a moment within human becoming, which aspires to record that moment and the way it has influenced both the artist and the universe that contains it. Every artwork is a fragment of its creator, a fragment of history that, in some way, seeks to produce behavioral or simply emotional shifts within its own contemporaneity. In a work of art, nothing is accidental; although we may think otherwise, the artist creates with what they have, fully aware of their life, their environment, and their infinite universal data, and seeks to guide their practice toward the production of a work charged with content, drawn from both conscious and subconscious realms.

We are both ephemeral and eternal, just like the artwork which, although it may last for centuries or millennia, is also ephemeral. The most extraordinary aspect of the artwork is its emotional value, its testimonial value, and fundamentally its cultural value. We know the history of humanity, to a large extent, through works of art.

Anna Montanaro dedicates herself to this practice, carrying within it the full emotional weight that amplifies the evolution of these moments, in which the sustainability of the planet and its environment becomes an imperative. Within her work, one of the many possibilities we must support emerges: the colour of the earth, the colour of the sky, the rays of the sun. The growth of green rising from below, transforming the forms of life within the jungle of concrete and iron, reabsorbing us into something more natural, more intelligible.

The reasons for art must be "heard": they are not whims or games, they are vigilance, they are hope.

— Antonio Guzzo, art critic, Argentina. ANNA MONTANARO – "Sustainability from Earth to Sky"

The effigial substance of every breath of life: in Anna Montanaro's Ophelia, each breath, unremembered, breaks into the other like a living wave. And it is our most intimate Face that emerges from the canvas, like a petal returning to the heart that had once lost it. The technical, narrative, emotional, and conscious stratification introduced by the Maker becomes a warning of the invaluable and an intimate mirror of memories—silent of them, yet a trembling, resonant echo, a moving and immaculate source.

— Giada Tarantino, art critic and art historian