TIZIANO MARTINI
Andreae
25.05 2023 > 09.09.2023
Press release / Comunicato stampa
A+B Gallery opens Andreae, the third solo exhibition of Tiziano Martini, in which a ten years long collaboration will be celebrated. For the first time the High Performance Paintings series is presented to the public, seven paintings of large format executed with bi-component polyurethane paints, a material that fits ideally into the research on indirect painting that Martini has been pursued for some time. A text by Roberto Lacarbonara on the artist’s practice will be divulged during the opening of the exhibition.
Andreae, the title of the exhibition, is the name of the smoke abatement filter that needs to isolate the particles released inside Tiziano Martini’s studio. In fact, during his painting experiments, massive amounts of fumes and parcelled spray paint disperse into the air.
The title also refers to the idea of filter with regard to the artist’s practice, particularly the moment in which he limits direct action on the surface of paintings to favor a specific process, almost mechanical, that excludes the results of more traditionally practice.
The use of a method very close to a productive act, in this case highly effective in technological terms, allows the artist to enter an unexplored world, a “sculpted painting” that is unexpectedly revealed during the process.
Made on mdf, the paintings are generated by processes borrowed by a direct experience of the artist in the motors world, particularly in the varnishing area. The result of this experience was importan for the artist in a theorical point of view, because helped him to gain competences and to live in places of organized work, with very high standards of execution, still important in Martini poetics’.
The title of the exhibited series, High Performance Paintings, is borrowed by the quality of the medium, here used as in the car bodyworks and result of an advanced research in this field. Martini fits perfectly within the role of the artist serving painting, where the method, codified in a specific project, has its roots in the study of anatomy, printmaking and art history in the academy’s classrooms.
Poliurethanic varnishes, bi-component, with natural colors, cold, fluo, metallic, are accumulated and spread by alternating manually distributed layers. Chemical drying of the layers returns a hard, workable material that is smoothed through tools mechanical roto-orbital or roto-eccentric tools removing, but almost cutting, the thickness and revealing completely unexpected sections even for the artist.
Images are stopped, deleted, restored and then, thank to the ambiguity and evanescence, closed and blocked with transparent high-solid and polished.
The result is a complex surface, alternating between elements that are hyper-defined or totally out of focus.
This new painting cycle marks a new expressive direction that Martini has approached in 2019, transforming his studio into a place of “garage jobs.” This latest phase is extremely consistent with his path, which began with hyperfiguration works between 2003 and 2007.
Then he moved on to pictorial works that oscillated between abstraction and figuration from 2007 to 2011; the processual works, in which he began to question the gestuality of the pictorial act in a radical way, manifested between 2010 and 2014 through acts of appropriation and assemblage, while the monotype series, between 2014 and 2019, is characterized by painting that arises from its own processes and for which the artist is only the activator. From 2019 he began a research on polyurethane works that continues in this latest cycle.
Press:
ARTE, Cairo editore (luglio); L’inkiesta.it; Collezionedatiffany.com; Cabette.com; Segnoonline.it