His pictorial images in which fin de siècle dreams, sensitive tonalisms and failed fairy tales of our time gravitate (...)                                                                   Prof. Dr. Carlo Franza

CRITICAL TEXT

The recently undertaken aesthetic language unites photography, printing and painting in a "unicum". Elements functional to the poetics of Anna Montanaro. They represent her memory in her confused, fragmented and fragmentary being; her memory, in its romanticism and in her sweetness, to preserve it and transport it to the present. An introspective search for images of one's unconscious which, from time to time, emerge from the canvas like a memory trapped in the memory. An image that is sometimes blurred and in some cases clear, in which: objects, figures and shapes mix resulting in a dreamlike narrative. The technique used is deliberately ephemeral and latent aimed at emphasizing the narrative and involving the viewer in the search for similar elements. Scratches and continuous glazes alternate, creating a process with multiple overlapping layers that give depth to the narrative by "stratigraphically and sedimenting" the image, immortalizing it over time.

Dr. Prof. Giorgio Gregorio Grasso - Art historian and critic

Anna Montanaro manages to combine multiple techniques, multiple philosophies, multiple artistic languages, multiple aesthetic languages ​​to create a work that you cannot define in any way except with Anna Montanaro's personal work. Notes of travel represents India but the hope is that the project will be extended to other states. Anna Montanaro's work excites you, it makes you experience a reality you didn't think of, it lets you enter a magical world you didn't imagine. Anna Montanaro's true skill - which comes from painting - in this case is in recognizability which is very difficult in photography and is one of the most important successes of an Artist. As you will then see, each work has its own story, each work has its own message, each work wants to say something; in reality they will be "Travel Notes", but they are not travel notes, because Anna represents the whole of humanity, the philosophy of life, the philosophy of civilization, therefore it goes far beyond the message that she would like to limit by a title that is reductive .

Dr. Prof. Giorgio Gregorio Grasso - Art historian and critic

Anna Montanaro's mixed media works (that rely on memories that provoke feelings that are transformed into symbols as a final result) are exploring outer scene (the dance) the same way as an intimate, inner scene (the parenting) thus blurring the percepton for "in" and "out" saying: "We are one!". 

Dr. Kornelija Koneska, Art critic and director of Osten Biennial of drawing and Osten Catoon, Skopje, Macedonia.

The numerous symbols, alongside concrete images in digital processing, allow Anna Montanaro to construct works developed on different perspective planes and levels, which can recall childhood fantasies and memories or existing visual glimpses. Observers are invited to undertake a "journey" between real and unreal, in the dialectical interlocking of daily needs "the same for everyone", such as water. The painter tends, on some occasions, to fill voids, to bring together shapes, objects and people, trying to involve the public in a journey of introspection and analysis. The juxtaposition and alternations - between graphic aspects and tones, between lights and shadows - make the visions represented sumptuous.

(from) Nuova Arte: Review of artists and participants in the "Art Prize 2015-2016", Cairo ed.; Anna Montanaro page. 32

Maestro Anna Montanaro was born in Carate Brianza and already at the age of eleven he attended the free F.A.L. Artistic Academy. After obtaining his artistic high school diploma at the Pio XI in Desio, under the guidance of Marcello Maloberti and Giampiero Moioli, he enrolled at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan in Art Restoration, specializing first in the restoration of paintings on canvas and wood from the 16th and 17th centuries at the PDM institute in Prato and, later, in the restoration of frescoes, surface stuccos with Giuseppina Suardi and Elena Gigliarelli at the Dedalo's Academy in Brescia.

She then assisted Professor Luciana Biliotti in the ancient paintings course at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Among the awards we remember the recent award for Graphic Art at OSTEN-Biennale di Drawing 2022 in Skopje (Macedonia). Tender faces look out, they are patient children; attentive and curious they lie down on a brown surface, a photographic shot with vintage colours; the toy bears in the center, eyes wide and glassy. Anna Montanaro's work presents itself as a revealing investigation of lost emotional resonance. Apparent kaleidoscopic reiteration of the same child, the pure soul of the depicted, crossroads of numerous moments of existence, flees, disconsolate, the visitor's gaze, so much sweetness and trouble innocent pupils, so much vigor still in opening the hands, alibi instruments of doing as well as healthy. They express fears, anxieties lying in the heart, they seek hope, long-awaited love. As they get busy, their dilated moment stops the sudden abandonment of the flapper's wings. Like a play mat, almost like a waiting room, it softens and muffles melancholy sobs, the early sufferers find a semblance of tranquility and laughing warmth. The teddy bears smile, listen, words they don't pronounce but understanding and affection they release. Guardians of sweet and bitter memories, the children, nostalgic guardians, reveal their silent history to them and they, caring confidants, gradually dissolve the lump of pain. Realism is given by photography, paint and resin overflow with a romantic touch: the Dadaist photomontage of Ours, long from arid experiments with sentimentalism, turns into an anchor of connection. Patiens blends the aura of tragedy of existence and confidence in the future into a single narrative, while the plots weave a tapestry of loving empathy.

Dr. Stefania Pieralice - International critic of modern and contemporary art (from) V Triennial Catalog of Visual Arts in Rome "The Poetics of Differences", pages. 180 - 181, 2023.

Her pictorial images in which fin de siècle dreams, sensitive tonalisms and failed fairy tales of our time gravitate, Anna Montanaro is an artist of today, with an entirely figural and real bent that incorporates her new narrativity; and she fully experiences the scope of national signals to which she has leapt for distinction because she allows modernity and tradition to coexist.

Prof. Dr. Carlo Franza - International critic of modern and contemporary art

The discovery of the possibility of letting different artistic techniques interact and mixing them, transforming them into a personal and recognizable style, has generated in contemporary creatives the tendency to explore emotions and sensations which are then expressed in the way most similar to their own expressive inclination, without having to stick to rules or stylistic limitations that would not allow them to feel free to make their voices heard spontaneously. The artist I will tell you about today merges two apparently distant techniques, photography and painting, which however, by virtue of his expressive ability, overlap and harmonize in a delicate and intense universe with a strong emotional impact. The twentieth century was a century of artistic experimentation, as well as technological innovations and, although in the early years a link was maintained with painting understood in the most classic sense of the term, moving forward towards the 1950s we began to carry out contaminations between art understood in a more traditional sense and the discoveries that followed rapidly. Photography, cinema, research on kinetics, the discovery of objects as forms of art, everything was functional in giving life to artistic languages ​​that were sometimes outside the box, other times provocative and, in the case of some movements, denigrating the society of era. Dadaism was the first current in which everything that was unconventional could be transformed into art, as in the case of the urinal transformed into a fountain by Marcel Duchamp, but also where techniques such as collage, which characterized the artistic production of Hannah Höch, and the photomontage that made John Heartfield famous, became the basis of research for subsequent movements that took inspiration from those innovations. Surrealism, which was born from the ashes of Dadaism, became closer to cinema, to moving images which became the completion of the work or simply part of the experimental path of the artists who joined it, as in the case of Salvador Dalì who created disturbing films together with director Luis Buñuel, or by Man Ray in which photography itself became a work of art through which to underline and materialize the guidelines of the movement, while collage distinguished one of the few women belonging to Surrealism, Eileen Adgar. But the interaction between image and art did not stop with those avant-gardes of the first decades of the twentieth century, on the contrary, as time continued, it was precisely collage that became emblematic of many exponents of Pop Art, from the Englishman Peter Blake to the Italian Mimmo Rotella who, with his Pop style mixed with Nouveau Réalisme in which he reassembled excerpts of advertising posters with icons of the 1950s, left an indelible mark on the history of international art. And yet the famous contemporary Michelangelo Pistoletto even breaks every mold and inserts photographic images of ordinary people inside mirrors in which the illusion between the real and the observed gives the user disorientation and at the same time the charm of imagining a dimension different from that normally experienced. The Lombard artist Anna Montanaro returns to a much more traditional style compared to the aforementioned masters of the twentieth century, in the sense that the figuration and order of the work tend towards a realist representation, while nevertheless characterizing her canvases with photographic inserts that mixes to an evanescent painting, almost fading between dream and memory, an in-between world that everyone encloses within their own emotional treasure chest and this is why the nostalgic sensation cannot help but envelop the observer. However, the artist's journey backwards is not limited to his own emotional baggage, that which belongs to the interiority and life story of each individual, but rather extends to collective memory, dedicating a series of canvases to great events and great characters. of the sporting past, to the symbols of Classicism, always using what distinguishes all his production, that is, the overlap between photographic images and pictorial contribution through which he manages to instill that suspended atmosphere where color becomes emotional underlining. Black and white represent nostalgia for a glimpse or a landscape no longer belonging to the present but still alive in the artist's memory, beige embodies a symbol deposited in the emotional treasure chest and which has the sweet flavor of the pleasant moment, of the moment magic in which something beautiful linked to that glimpse is linked to the emotional world and then the bright colors to give life back to a past that needs to be described in stronger colours.

Dr. Marta Lock - art critic

The delicate and intense fragments of memory in the stylistic overlap of Anna Montanaro, (from) L'opinionista online, magazine 1 April 2022

In her artistic research, Anna Montanaro shows that she follows two apparently different approaches which arise, however, from the same sensitivity in the way of conceiving art: as a static vision, according to the canons of a classicizing perfection, or according to a dynamic, contemporary conception , in which artistic making develops freely and actively. Certain images, portraits and graffiti studies, seem like postcards from the old days with the scent of the beauty of memories and profound meanings, images veiled by a transparent curtain, barely visible, sometimes compact, white, with drapes that fall at the feet of the protagonists like a barrier, almost an invitation to lift it to discover an unknown world. In this first way, Anna Montanaro's art transmits a mysterious nostalgia that envelops and dominates the atmosphere of the works, as if the artist was pleased to relive repressed feelings without compressing the vital impulses, which are consumed in themselves between tacit keyboards of an internalized music. Closer to sculpture, this series of works emphasizes the beauty and fragility of being seen according to statuary perfection: naked bodies posing, in soft, harmonious, sleeping attitudes, sometimes presented from behind, sometimes in twists, or from the front , close to an enigmatic form of an archaic horse that stands out due to its full-bodied figure. And again a mythological couple, Angelica and Medoro, ready to engrave their love story on the bark of the tree; and faces of melancholy in which expressiveness is concentrated in the intensity of the gaze lost in deep contemplation and immersed in expectation; portraits exhibited in profile in expert silence, as in Siliere, or an enigmatic Ophelia with her face marked in two slightly contrasting parts. The angel with wide wings appears emblematic, kneeling in front of a white river that submerges him like an uncontainable avalanche, a luminous, beneficial signal or just a deceptive disguise that urges submission? Does it express impotence, prayer, rebellion, enlightenment or harmless yet decisive evasion? The artistic discourse continues with a metaphorical flight of butterflies, a constant in the author's creative imagination, not by chance associated with children with their elusive desires that provoke the cry of the man-child, or outstretched hands that reach out to take a toy, offer a flower to the symbol of metamorphosis, or representation of the Psyche, migrating souls, complex impulses, transcendent phases to access lively and engaging real life. And we are in the second way, when the creative act frees itself from the reflective nostalgia for a static classical beauty and focuses on realistic images, a stance in which interest in the social event, in psychology, in the moods, forms and meanings of a development of artistic thought that adapts to a constantly changing reality. The protagonists are once again the children who walk with the sweet pace of friendship, play hide and seek, or stand in thoughtful poses next to a labyrinthine portico. It is a lively and coordinated dance in the harmony of movements in which each participant contributes to the accomplished gesture of joy; Urania, the blindfolded young muse of astronomy alludes to an ancestral relativism; various portraits of children with their eyes lit up by questions waiting for answers. The tennis players, the great Wimbledon challenge, an Indian woman at work, witness for a Travel Notes project, join in a dynamic atmosphere. In this dynamic vision, Amarcord or ice cream trams with a precise destination, and the racing cars of the agile beauty of Lamborghini could not be missing. A new Sensum chapter opens with strong images linked to the dramatic situation caused by a virus which, due to the violence of the contagion, has changed the course of life in the world. The artist presents it as a symbol of fear, a silhouette made in charcoal, equipped with a gas mask; then he continues with a photographic collage in colour, paint and resin, faces in which we can read fear, loneliness, anger, pain, hope, happiness. As Anna Montanaro herself states, her artistic language is "a moral concept", which on the one hand emphasizes the aesthetics of classical perfection and on the other captures senses and sensations from a current world that she wants to reveal with her art and denounce with objectivity; this is why Anna Montanaro is an artist and at the same time she is a voice!

Anna Montanaro. A voice for art. Dr. Victoria Dragone - Poet and art critic

Anna Montanaro works on the image and on the materials that become the primary structure of the subject. In her scratched painting, tones, colours, brushstrokes overlap lightly but decisively, giving depth and richness of visual planes which are slowly revealed to the observer's eye. Her art is refined, full of conceptual ideas, in which the mask, the double, the reflection, the transparency take on an ideal and mental value.

Dr. Guido Folco President Editor-Director-Founder of the international monthly "Italia Arte". Director and Curator of the MIIT Museum in Turin. President of the Folco Gallery. Professional journalist. Art historian and critic. Cultural Manager Aspim Europe. Defensor de Bens Culturais Instituto de Recuperaçao do Patrimônio Historico no Estato de São Paolo do Brasil. President of the Aldilà Artistic Movement Study Center. Member of the Honorary Committee of the Venice Art Triennale of Palazzo Albrizzi Capello and of the BIAC International Biennial of Contemporary Art in Potenza. Murgia Biennial Collaborator. Scilla Jazz Festival collaborator. Curator of 'FIMAC International Mediterranean Festival of Contemporary Art'.

Artistic expression is the result of a moment in human becoming, which aspires to record that moment and how it affected the artist and the universe that contains him. Each work is a piece of its creator, it is a piece of history, which in some way tries to achieve behavioral or simply emotional changes in its contemporaneity. In the work of art nothing is random, although we think differently, the artist creates with what he has and is aware of his life, his environment and his infinite universal data and tries to guide his doing to obtain a operates with contents, from conscious and subconscious. We are ephemeral and eternal and just like the work of art which, although it lasts centuries and millennia, is also ephemeral. The magnificent thing about the work of art is its emotional value, its testimonial and fundamentally cultural value. We know humanity's past, to a large extent, thanks to works of art. Anna Montanaro dedicates herself to this work and does it with all the internal emotional load that amplifies the evolution of these moments, in which the sustainability of the planet and its environment is an imperative. One of the many possibilities that we have to support the color of the earth, the color of the sky, the rays of the sun is manifested in it. The development of greenery that grows from below, modifying the life forms in the concrete and iron jungle and reabsorbing us into something more natural, more understandable. The reasons for art must be "listened to", they are not whims or games, they are alert, they are hope.

ANNA MONTANARO - "Sustainability from earth to sky''. Dr. Antonio Guzzo - Art critic, Argentina.

La expresión artística es el resultado de un momento en el devenir humano, que aspira a dejar constancia de ese instante y como afectó al artista y al universo que lo contiene. Cada obra es un pedazo de su creador, es un pedazo de historia, que de alguna manera intenta obtener cambios de conducta o simplemente emocionales en su contemporaneidad. En la obra de arte nada es azaroso, aunque pensemos lo contrario, el artista crea con lo que tiene y tiene conciencia de su vivir, de su entorno e infinidad de datos universales y trata de guiar su hacer para obtener una obra con contenido, desde lo consciente y subconsciente.Así como nosotros somos efímeros, la obra de arte, aunque dure siglos y milenios, o eras, también es efímera. Lo magnifico de la obra de arte es su valor emocional, su valor testimonial y fundamentalmente cultural. Conocemos el pretérito de la humanidad, en gran medida, gracias a las obras de arte. Anna Montanaro, abocada a esta obra, lo hace con toda la carga que guarda en su interior para magnificar el devenir de estos momentos, en que es imperioso la sustentabilidad del planeta y su entorno. Manifiesta en ella una de las tantas posibilidades que disponemos para sustentar el color de la tierra, el color del cielo, los rayos del sol. Elevando desde abajo el verde in crescendo, modificando formas de vida en la jungla de hormigón y hierro y reabsorbernos en un algo más natural, más comprensible. Las razones del arte deben ser ¨oídas¨, no son caprichos ni juegos, son alertas, son esperanza.

In this work the artist Anna Montanaro demonstrates that she moves very well within a genre of contemporary painting which, combining ancient and modern, uses schemes and matrices of informal origin - in particular, gestures and a sort of dripping. - to represent a fragment extrapolated from a broader view attributable to the romantic tradition. The depth and effects created on the liquid mass are notable; the vision of this work demonstrates how interesting and valid the results obtainable with this type of research are, as it manages to propose new emotions and sensibilities, in a context that can be defined - as has been acutely stated - of a neo-naturalism. The artist Anna Montanaro was able to propose an image that has every appearance of having been ideally extrapolated from a broader image, to summarize the stylistic and content characteristics.

Amedeo Bigotti - Critic and Art Historian

The subject depicted is revealed to us by the title: "Ice cream tram or Amarcord". One of the meanings of the word Amarcord is precisely "nostalgia for memories", and this painting evokes it. The romanticism in the depiction is found in the historical sense of the word, that desire to return to the past, the nostalgia for other times is revealed in the subject which looks like a vintage photo. We are in front of a city view, and we see up close the road along which the ice cream tram passes. The nostalgia is increased by the fact that the city is completely deserted, without a soul, while the tram proceeds alone to follow its route.

Anna Montanaro has found her own unique pictorial language and not comparable to anyone else. She has developed an expressive method that manages to combine various techniques, such as paint, collage, digital processing, printing on canvas and intervention with acrylic colors to achieve new solutions. This combination of photography, printing and painting results in paintings with an almost ancient flavor but a purely contemporary workmanship. She manages to combine ancient and modern. The ancient, for example, shines through from the repetitive signs that dot the canvas and almost seem to transform it into a fabric with precious embroidery, over which the depiction of the subject then makes its way. Furthermore, the colors overall give the effect of being faded, lightened perhaps due to too long exposure of the pigments to the sun, just like a fabric. Or would it be better to say that it is a work with colors that can recall a wall painting? Whether it is one thing or the other is obviously dictated by our imagination but in the overall impact what we get is a reference to the past. It thus creates a stratification between references to the past and contemporary technologies, a dichotomy between ancient and present. In fact, his painting has already been described as "An introspective search for images of one's own unconscious which, from time to time, emerge from the canvas like a memory trapped in the memory. (...) Scratches and continuous veiling alternate, creating a multi-layered process overlapping layers that give depth to the narrative, stratigraphically and sedimenting the image, immortalizing it over time."

Anna Montanaro was born in 1981 in Carate Brianza. Since she was young, she was passionate about art and continued a course of study in line with her creative streak, first attending the Pio art. Subsequently, she deepened her studies, focusing on the restoration of ancient paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the restoration of frescoes. She followed these courses at the PDM institute in Prato and at the Dedalo Study Center in Brescia. In 2016 you also obtained the ministerial qualification of Collaborator Restorer of Cultural Heritage - Restoration Technician.

Although these biographical information might suggest a style of classical and academic taste, the painter is a precise observer of the contemporary, using mixed techniques and various creative methods in the creation of her canvases. Although her works sometimes have a nostalgic flavor towards the past, the technical research that she is carrying out is very current and singular. This unique and recognizable style of hers has also allowed her to participate in several collective exhibitions. Among the most recent she can boast the Art Prize exhibition at Palazzo Reale in Milan, the 16th National Art Prize in Novara; the W.A.B. Biennial in Bra; and the solo show at the Zengallery space also in Milan. Her works have also been reviewed in important publications in the sector such as the Catalogo dell'ArteModerna n. 52, Editorial Giorgio Mondadori.

Memory itself, the silent reverberation of the Effigy and the Colour: immaculate source for the soul that vibrates from it, listening madly. "Silere" (50x70 cm) is an evocative work by Anna Montanaro.

The depicted substance of every breath of life: to feel it coming, to be able to cross it; every forgetful breath breaks into one another, like a living wave, and it is our intimate Face that emerges from the canvas, like a petal that returns to the heart that had lost it. "Amarcord or ice cream tram" (cm 80x120, 2017 - already published in NUOVA ARTE, Ed. G. Mondadori, 2017), is a lyrical work created by the artist Anna Montanaro.

Dr. Giada Eva Elisa Tarantino - Art historian and critic

In Anna Montanaro's unmistakable and personality-filled work we see, in the courage of the sober tones and the delicacy of the features, fragments of struggles; a true imprinted feeling that invites above all to observe the Work and the colors without haste, to grasp a message of transformation in the Soul and in Thought.

Dr. Roseli Crepaldi - Art critic and curator, CEO of the Milanese Gallery

In this article I intend to highlight Anna Montanaro's notable artistic career. Born in 1981, Anna Montanaro has a lifelong artistic education, which results in a multilingualism articulated in anagogical, anthropological, socially strong and evolutionary nuances. The artist acquires numerous awards which lead her to national and international exhibitions. His pictorial and photographic ability is recognizable immediately, from the ancestral and dreamlike expressiveness of the depictions, which transport users into a dream world, suspended between everyday reality and the afterlife, where the transmutation of the soul resonates quiet and fast in today's pace. Each nuance is therefore, a thousandth of time to be captured in its surprising voracity, where everything resonates without music, falling into a magical compositional silence, which starts an orchestral and lyrical journey to be perfumed through perspective divergences and light dance pauses, touched with due sinuosity. The founding characteristic is its universal plurilingualism endowed with an indissoluble mimesis, with cosmic perceptions in human and superhuman forms, articulated in perfect geometric mirrors that have become fragments, within which dialogue according to numerous meanings and interpretations, as if there were a progression and a regeneration of the visible world transformed into perennial visions that create continuous connections. In this sense, the word is always a new incipit, which induces a primordial introduction to the latent sense of emotion made truthful in its own essence. We are not numbers but complete souls of eternal meaning in the perenniality of a mysterious path.

Arianna Di Presa - Poet and writer.

The plurilingualism of Anna Montanaro, (in) www.lavoceaglitaliani.it

With Anna Montanaro, matter takes on primordial anthropological and spiritual values!

Mattea Micello - Art Historian and Critic

A communicative art with a strong expressive impact, the balanced use of warm colors and overlapping glazes allow a sweet empathy with the work. The compositions and balances become a driving theme that combines figurative elements with geometric spatial ones creating new harmonious components.

Chiara Bovio - Art Critic

Anna Montanaro's works are a spectacular example of a mix of emotions. The great variety of subjects and her refined techniques make her figures fluid, or granitic, almost carved into the rock, like the faces of the APPUNTI DI VIAGGIO project. Her transfigurations or visions are a spectacle for the observer who would never tire of watching. Anna Montanaro's works are full of symbols and archetypes that transform the reading of the painting into an intellectual and multidimensional experience.

Maurizio Ganzaroli