Alchemical Portals
By Dores Sacquegna

“The most ancient works of art were born, as it’s known, as a service for rituals, first magic, then religious” Walter Benjamin

For a better comprehension of the artist’s entire Works, I invite the reader to observe attentively the works of art and slowly go back with the memories, in the ancient times, whose esoteric religions availed themselves of rites bound to differentiated energetic entities.
The human being, or the microcosm, it’s the individualized and differentiated image of this energy, which once was used to possess its power.
The contact with energetic forces – helped by the study and practice of oriental disciplines, like yoga- , the charm for material and it’s sacredness, an archaic after-taste of alchemy, the knowledge of nature-related religions and life’s essentiality, have exercised a spiritual power on the Artist which towards the harmony of the Self and to a continuous experimentation of techniques and materials, whose stylistic figure moves from post-figurativism to conceptual.
The artist moulds the polychrome terracotta, sculpts wood, assembles crystals, cast iron and mechanical elements in a continuous game of ready-made, whose result generates a meta-temporal atmosphere, suspended among a memorial past and a futurist present. This way form the essentiality of shapes, full-blown totemic idols, which she calls “Stargates”, the doors of Heaven, emerge.
In the ancient cosmology the existence of two portals or “Stargates” was considered, where the Sun’s ellipse (the apparent solar orbit) meets the Milky Way: one, positioned in the northern hemisphere in Sagittarius, and the other one in the southern hemisphere in Gemini, above Orion’s “club”. This ancient creed past on the Gnostic Christianity and it’s still symbolised by the two keys in St. Peter’s hand, the guardian of Heaven’s twin gates and by the two crossed keys in the papal coat of arms. The mythical-ritual symbols have been considered as research instruments means of re-integration of the alienated psychic contents. They configure and re-integrate the lost history as magic or as a loss of values or of archetypal cultural traditions. Sonia Giavitto’s works of art emanate a sacred aura, alchemical, whose subjects on the steles show Dedalus’ labyrinth, Time, Space and Myth. And there is no history without myth: in myth there are stories of men who look for themselves, loose themselves and then magically find themselves again.
The artist uses myth and energy to solve complex dynamics on the archetypal couple, as is for example in “Gli Sposi(omaggio a Caruso” or “Jeev & Deb Jeev(Gli Sposi)” or “La Sposa Austriaca” and again “Il Narcisista”.
Complex works of art, not easy to read, but at the same time magnetic, anthropomorph and  surreal.
Her sculptures have often conical shape, alienated faces with rapacious heads, combination padlocks positioned over the heart, keys and other objects taken form every day’s life. Works that draw from an abstract territory where archaic and dream melt with technology; where the God hidden in matter, fastened by fire, creates surprising chromatic games.
Also interesting is the series of “Houses”, whose geometric composition puts in evidence an accurate analysis, both plastic and of colours, such as in “Casa degli Sposi”.
Here, the artist realizes full-blown sceneries inspired by the 15th century’s pre-modernity, in some cases even with a bohemian taste. A “theatre of the double” as A. Artaud said, that plays with the harmonic dualism of black, red, yellow and blue.
Sonia Giavitto’s magic boxes are the “soul places” bound to the tender allusion of the marital life. They’re the places where the banal reality is exhibited and lived through the feeling of loss for something unrepeatable or very personal.
Rooms, abandoned by mysterious occupants, open up to indiscrete visions, violations of fictitious cosiness, accomplices windows and open spaces.
Three-dimension is the artist’s expression, her elegant way of communicating through a sense of theatre, staging of places voted to the flanèur’s visual experience, a game of mirrors between interior and exterior. A voyage, then, which Sonia enterprises on a memory made of remembrances, sensations, anguishes: a voyeurism bound to our relationship with reality which leads us to look at the inside from the outside.
A spur, if we want to, to feel like Alice in the moment when she enters Wonderland, in the place where the vision has its origins.
The result is suggestive. With Sonia Giavitto’s works of art, we enterprise a travel in the dilated space, in Time’s suspension, where the natural element meets the man or better….the signs of his passage.