DANI MARTI has crafted new works for his upcoming exhibition Blow that focus in on the communion between the artist and his materials, a relationship that is bound within his unconventional 'canvases'.
Weaving, bending and sewing his materials together by hand, Marti invests each 'painting' with a rhythm that suggests the performative process of making. Untethering his work from the stories of his heroes and neighbours, Marti now explores the psychology of surface through acrylic, polyester and aluminium.
These new works take on the guise of abstract paintings, with each raw part acting as a fleck of paint. However, instead of resolving into a portrait, landscape, or other appearance, Marti's materials have a sensual certainty in themselves.
As Scott Millington notes, "His videos, weavings and assembled sculptures are often described as stories or portraits, but give few details about their subjects. They are essentially abstract, and evoke personal identities and states of being by means of sensation. In Marti's Story of I am series, tightly woven surfaces of cord and rope present the barest frame of narrative reference. Unable to project forward or read into them, we engage with the textures of the materials and the variations of the weave. Drawing on a minimalist method of reduction, Marti eschews easy visual cues to tease out a specific sensory response from us. He likens these woven surfaces to 'skins', as if he intends that we experience them as we do bodies - as active, tactile sites of repulsion and desire. Marti suggests that our story is not an objective one, but a dense history of invisibly interwoven sensation inscribed on the body."
(Catalogue essay, 2016)
Even though each work strives for the liberating feeling of objectivity, they are inevitably taut with the desires and body of the artist. As these quasi-sculptural forms double and invert on themselves, individual traces of the artist are both bound within the work and unravelled in the process of viewing. Ultimately, Marti's works elude a concrete reading, favouring the infinite psychologies of colour, surface and texture.
In striking contrast to his woven works that seek to explore within the skin, trapping psychological moments with sensual tautness, detached and elusive, Dani Marti's video works often have a claustrophobic closeness to his subjects. Yet they still set out to explore portraiture and sexuality within a contemporary context. Included in this exhibition is Thin Air (2015), originally commissioned for the exhibition Exhibit A, curated by Carrie Miller, that explored ethics involved in the creative process and criminology. Thin Air, with its auto-erotic asphyxiation undertones, is uncomfortable, mesmerising, viewing.
Marti splits his time between Barcelona and Sydney, working across sculpture, installation, public art and video. He has exhibited extensively both in Australia and overseas, including in The public body .02 at Artspace, Sydney (2017), Black Sun, Fremantle Arts Centre, for the 2016 Perth International Arts Festival; Immerse at Sandneskulturhus, Norway (2016), Video Stage, Art Stage Singapore (2015), and Obey! at Centro Cultural Matucana.
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