No influence from  the beautiful Portuguese school of water-colour  painters, is to be found in her work. But  she approaches this difficult art with a feminine delicacy, a softness, a shyness, almost and a romantic lirism. By thus expressing her feelings and her visions of reality, her work  translates dream, fantasy and loneliness.

But I will now give the floor to the Italian critics of art who knew how to accurately assess her work:

Vasco Bettencourt Sampaio

“… her technique has reached such a refinement that she is able of reproducing both dawns and  twilights with surprising chromatic effects and  her marine ,landscapes with light playing on the water are , indeed, a rather astonishing view. The fascination of her paintings lies on the simplicity of her work, a simplicity which is at the basis or her life,of her so naïf and enchanted soul; one thinks she is re-born the day she started painting again…”

Rita Muccitelli

“… the lightness she paints will  tells us how discreet she is and  how softly she treads upon this chaotic and convulsives world ; this is quite clearly stated by her paintings with their half-closed windows, their lace curtains, their soft and pale colours and their skies so  bright  that even her mother country hasn’t ever had so bright ones. The silent and soft landscapes where human beings are rarely seen bear evidence of a certain loneliness of  an artist living in a foreign  country. But human beings  are nevertheless around  even if they can’t be seen: their presence is shown by the clothes hanging from the windows (which bestow some movement upon the image)  and in the flower vases full of geraniums and red bougainvilleas. These silent transparencies are a rest for the eyes of those attending her exhibitions – these are indeed intoxicating and romantic emotions. Order is also for Ventura a vital issue and this is clearly shown by the schematism of her painting in wich  everything  has a proper space and nothing superfluous disturbs its balance…”

Claudio De Rocco

“… the great sensitivity shadhown by the artist Maria C. Ventura when expressing her creative skill is the outcome of a long questioning of her inner self. Contact with nature during her frequent travels enables her to quickly focus on anything attracting her which she then filters through her romantic emotions…”

Francesco Chetta

…”Maria C. Ventura with her water-colours caresses the ancient emotive mystery of her life and she turns a landscape, an image into well-defined memories of her distant Lisbon for ever alive and present in her heart…

…a dream like expression of a world left untouched through the culture of images .  Maria C. Ventura  describes landscapes stories of a land lying by the sea, through her colourful and delicate paintings…

… to the delicate and expressive syntesis of an artist who has chosen the charm of water-colours paintings to lead us to her world , Maria C. Ventura  alternates landscapes and sensations, as, for her, to paint is like breathing the emotion of memories…

…  Maria C. Ventura carries on with her pictorial rising specializing herself in water-colour technique which surrenders itself to chromatic movements, overcoming the “dèjà-vu” to lead us into her most alive emotions. Her works assume aspects of artistic singularity because each one of them narrates an endless and magic story.

Her paintings fulfil with dignity, poetic tales, offering themes to creative minds which become touched in front of the mystic surrender of “the little boy dreaming by the sea…”  

Mariarosaria Belgiovine

“… Maria Ventura’s works remind us the big travellers of past centuries while she re- borns Portugal from the cultural reality point of view and enhances architectonic remains that came after , from romantic Coimbra, to Diana’s temple in Évora, and Romanesque Cistercians monks in Alcobaça etc…

Maria C. Ventura’s thematic does not extinguish in memories of her country : she strolls as well through middle age landscapes and Italian renaissance: as such she dedicates one water –colour painting to Baronial Castle in Fondi ,in a vision idealized thanks to a romantic state of mind in a surrealistic atmosphere in which the only leaving beings that appear in the painting are flocks of birds surrounded by a cloister like silence... Maybe in  this small work measuring 30X40cm. and dated 1996, resides the artist secret the  eradication from completely different land and culture as from that where she was born , almost transcendent  , composed by nostalgia and fate identifying themselves with Portuguese word “saudade” expressing afterwards in “fado”. These sensations are also enhanced in motives like flowers with emphasized colours, similar to popular poetry, more spoken than sung…”

Giuseppe Labate

But it’s mainly Italo Marucci critic  that emphasizes in  a better way Maria C. Ventura’ s art:

“ Maria C. Ventura in her water-colour paintings, achieving in a sheet of paper an enchanted world of her own, either naïf or poetic or even still ironic and sentimental ,tells us through images  her Portugal and also Italy that record the development  of a romance which indeed is the result of her emotions and her own life.

Maria C. Ventura reveals a passionate and delicate character obtaining her poetic inspiration through the observation of scenes and transforming the whole of it in a fantastic event:   a sketch of Rome, one sunset in  Venice , a souvenir of her Lisbon and all of this ,thanks to her technique ,is transformed into a chromatic event.

In Ventura ‘s works there is  a touching and passionate appeal in what concerns landscape of the end of last century and recording oh her language has something pathetic by the need of escaping in an atmosphere where memories of certain places are an important reality.

Flowers and landscapes alternate in her works, but her links are stronger to the second , because that fundamental tendency that leads her to paint it.    Sceneries remain as she conceived them or, in other words, she puts herself in a state of careful observation facing nature “at rest” and this is like a continuous and hiden link between the   affection of her mind and landscape. From here is born, through a patient  and pictorial writing, a sort of calm, humble and loving elegy, issued in silence through the contact with shapes of the utmost reality (sea , mountains, plains…). Landscapes seem to welcome a will for pictorial research , delicate and apprehensive  ,in what concerns an adjustment to reason, always improving, to a kind of painting which does not want to ignore the results of modern art.

Maria C. Ventura’s art is one of those arts which require a choice in reality and consequently a decisive and strict  option regarding expressions of narrative and landscape painting: a poetry engaged in giving a more complete and real vision materialized in reality away from decaying and formalist  satisfactions idly intellectual. In her art a grasp of conscience is personified out of real aspects (surrounding, people, things  ) gathering  the value, matter of a vital and historical importance, from what concerns the artists. It is an austere water-colour painting from which true Mediterranean colours are represented within their very reality: plastic shapes of buildings do not lose any of their subjective essence; everything is dominated by a significant synthesis: fractures and opacities become components of a poetic vision which does not wish to enter neither in the ways of a decorative taste nor in that of a pathetic and scheduled picture. Taking into consideration her work, we discover right away besides the technique of her water-colour paintings, how her nature is: a warm and living feeling of the episode is offered by reality translated in a simple  manner, almost  like a speech. Even though instantaneous it is not an incomplete and superficial mention; on the contrary: a capacity to conclude in an efficient report, made of signs and colours, an atom of daily life. So, a sensible share in our surrounding world to which, either we wish it or not ,we also belong when we are artists. A world which is completely achieved in figurative terms, free from any conventions but totally respecting communicative demands and there  the strictness of structures match in a perfect way with the chromatic rapports enhanced and stimulated by a light which is to the artist (of Portuguese origin) an essential component which awards the magic of a dream to reality.”

Italo Marucci

The just words for the good work.

Vasco Bettencourt Sampaio