27.05.2015 > 26.06.2015
Martini breaks down the gestural continuity of the creative act in the painting, experimenting different ways, times and materials in his multi-phase works. His paintings are like stratified visual fields, deeply marked by the perseverant need to deny a planned result, strongly decked to find the unexpected potential of complex, precarious and unique material conditions. His research celebrates many substantial features of painting but makes symbolic and narrative attention become redundant.
Many and different procedures are to be found on the space described on the frame. Through the artist’s action, the colorful matter creates various transformations because of its physical and chemical features. Simultaneously, work time and space are somehow recorded on the artwork, whose almost absorbent nature can potentially be sediment of bordering matters and gestures.
The ludic rawness of this inclination intensifies the character of the compositional elements. The weight of the canvas could spread out the color, as much as gravity could play a significant role in creating the shapes in which the matters solidifies. Fleeing from what is said and repeated, the painter himself takes somehow distances from his work and becomes an instrument of it. Like a film director who leaves the supervision of the movie to become an operator and decides to manage the operations when a new amount of arbitrariness is needed in order to proceed.
The series of works at A+B are a complete collection of the new ways Martini has been experimenting recently and they confirm that functional aspect. He spreads a conspicuous amount of acrylic color on the frame of the canvas. He then lifts, turns, stretches out and presses on a plastic surface on the ground the various parts, like big matrixes for monotypes. When the acrylic is supposed to be dry – Martini never waits enough to be sure about it – he affixes every part on the front side and tears off the plastic surface. The quality of the rip, cautious or violent, defines the volume of the surface of the painting and creates final tactile and light features.
The result of these procedures depend on countless variables, such as time, weight, humidity, the conditions of the implied materials, the dust in the studio. The artist is passive in front of these. His duty and his interest are not to limit these possibilities. Even if he practically manages the structure of the work, his “mistakes”, such as the trace of shoes or a hair that have been absorbed in the artwork, are part of a language that reports the amount of reality he wants to reach, without any direct intervention.
The painter’s approach hides the visual culture that created the works. Martini did not give up his manner, his manual skill and his presence, although he does not accept to be harmoniously and linearly guided by the matter. He is the one who compresses it, moves and mixes it according to his feelings, but lets it pour out itself until he senses it is time for a new intervention.
With these works, Martini shows his intention to paint without explanations or excuses. He puts himself in a very traditional way of thinking against the risk of trying to exhibit paintings and end up exhibiting themselves. (GT)