Critics
Fabrizia Buzio Negri
Fabrizia Buzio Negri
“In absolute creative freedom through the technique of collage (with recycled elements and old newspapers, materials that hold life stories) the artist moves upon the feminine figure, with sensuality and irony, between rationality and emotion. Thought and motion, flesh and soul, between the abstract and the feminine archetype: particular is the dynamism that is born from fluid lines and colours. Fabrizia Buzio Negri
Stefano Lurati
In un’ opera – Speranza – che è tutta luce, l’artista celebra l’opera dei Frank come un sole che sorge portando vita nuova all’umanità sofferente. Due mani che sorreggono, che mostano, che ostendono un delicato e morbido feto, salutato da un’esplosione di colori su uno sfondo luminoso. La speranza è quella del malato verso l’atesa guarigione, è quella dell’umanità verso i progressi della scienza medica, è quella della vita che si rinova, è quella di un’ergia infinita che trascende i mondi visibili e che tutto pervade. E non è tutto questo una mirabile sintesi della missione e del lascito di Giovanni Pietro e Giuseppe Franck? Il tutto soffuso – nell’opera propostaci- da un pervaso sentimento d’amore. Stefano Lurati ( dal catalogo Medicamenta Et Curae, omaggio a Johann Peter e Joseph Franck , Pavia)
Enzo Le Pera
Negli ultimi tempi mi sembra che la figurazione sia ritornata ad una ribalta sempre maggiore, ponendosi più interessante rispetto all’astrazione; ed anche molti degli artisti che ho invitato rispecchiano questa tendenza. “Kiss me, Canova”, omaggio al grande scultore e ad Eros che abbraccia Psiche. L’ artista desidera celebrare così la joie de vivre combinando sulla tela ricerche astratto – informali con ricerche in ambito figurativo, con un uso parco del colore per dare luce e leggerezza al dipinto. Enzo Le Pera ( dal catalogo XLVI Premio Sulmona, Rassegna internazionale d’Arte contemporanea)
Fabrizia Buzio Negri, recensione monografia
Fabrizia Buzio Negri, recensione monografia
“If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness.” (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
“SUSPENDED” STORIES IN THE UNIVERSE OF LIGHTNESS
Fabrizia Buzio NegriNot easy to sustain, sometimes dramatic, sometimes complex to decipher. In our everyday lives we are involved in what Italo Calvino called “the busy spectacle of the world”: Writers and artists often show us the journey of lightness, a particular dimension through which to observe the world, opening up to extraordinary experiences. Calvino reflected on the subject in the first of his American Lessons, observing the “lightness” of art not at the start of a writer’s life, but during the writer’s maturity. “After forty years of writing fiction, after having explored various possibilities and carried out different experiments, it’s time to find a comprehensive definition for my work; I propose this: my work has mostly been a removal of weight; I have tried to remove weight at times from the figures, now from heavenly bodies, now from cities; above all, I have tried to remove weight from the story’s structure and from its language”. In one of her first accompanying texts, Martina Goetze Vinci struck me for the sensorial perception of an attempt to reacquire a status of lightness, over and above the difficulties of human experience. The answer lies in art, through which she intends to “reawaken the interior smile and help our first energy to free itself on the path of the Universal Soul”. No great revolution: In the specific nature of her language, Martina looks for “lightness” in the image which moves freely from its own context into a NON-SPACE. A different experience, a “being elsewhere” which art enshrines. Without wishing to explore the subject here through philosophy and anthropology, the artist’s search for a “place” explores the multiple distances between her and the real world, while she interprets the mysterious references to life in a non-place coloured by the surreal. Painting seems to have no weight. It has the connotations and meanings of alchemies “distant” to previous work, chromatically exasperated by the thickness of the collage. The rarefied space between body and soul, in the fluctuation of subtle secret energies, can also deny reality when painted with the intensity of infinite chromatic dispersions. Artistic hypotheses seem to end in this, her non-place, and at the same time start up again in fluid transits and challenges to perception. With disturbing feelings and imagination drawn from experience, never touching zero, only to rise again immediately, one after the other. In both the “before” and the “after”, the image leaves new hypotheses open, tending towards new sensorial and aesthetic experiences. Martina herself says: “the inspiration for my work often comes from an oxymoron. Placing together two concepts apparently in contrast or opposition fascinates me because it forces me to go beyond my limits and open up to new emotions.” The artist is a true “citizen of the world” having lived overseas before arriving in Italy. She seems to demonstrate the idea: “out nationality is our humanity.” This is how she feels. This is how she, a native of Hamburg, perhaps felt, like many of us, at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. An event which signalled a revolution in the History of peoples. A radical change in culture: it marked the beginning of an energetic globalisation in the art world. In diversity and modes, absolutely open, in highly amplified transversal comparisons. In a unitary ideal projection of a new collective identity between different cultures which had travelled through the utopia of a great, free world. That was thirty years ago. For Martina Goetze Vinci, this is the start of a long period of work and experimentation, a journey which is still “in progress”. Work that picks up on the mutations of a material which from its surface moves towards the three-dimensional. Time spent at the atelier of Wolfgang Krenckel at the Scuola degli Artefici in Brera soon brought her to define her affinities through personal exploration, accurate and dynamic in its themes and techiques. Among the experiences which fascinated Martina at the start of her career was the art of collage. We know that this technique has ancient origins; it was made popular in the early 1900s by the most well-known Cubist painters, Braque and Picasso, with their famous “papiers collés” in their search for original procedures that could render a more specific expression as an alternative to traditional painting. “Sybilla” is a particularly successful work from that experimental period: with an unpredictable organization of mixed technique and collage, an intense light enters the creative moment between the female figure and the folds resulting from the elaborated volumes of the collage. Oils, chalk, tissue paper, newspaper, glue, fragments of other material are successfully used as mutations in the drawing, elusive folds, striking chromatic densities. Other works demonstrate great three-dimensional force, such as “Water”, created for the EXPO 2015 exhibition in Milan/ Palazzo Renzo Piano, or in the complexity of “Enigma”. It is not easy to capture the stages of the artist’s language: the sensuality of the material, increasingly lightened, in a weightless tactile aspect, almost a progressive purification of the artist’s interior and emotions. In a game of interior magic, signs of deep, hard won transformations are defined: first in thought and then on canvas. New esthetic projections are traced, clots and tensions dissolve into new forms conjoined to new perceptions of the material, between fantasy and dreams, in immaterial weaving of light. The image withdraws (almost an escape from the real context) and represents itself “elsewhere”. The image reappears in a highly luminous chromatic vision, in a fleeting space/ time, a fluctuating allusion to the freedom of gesture and soul. As in a dream. The first few lines of a poem by Jorge Luis Borges are brought to mind: “El sueño” Cuando los relojes de la media noche prodiguen un tiempo generoso, iré mas lejos que los bogavantes de Ulises a la region del sueño, inaccesible a la memoria humana… The Dream When the clocks of midnight dispense a generous time, I’ll travel further than Ulisses’ rowers into the land of dreams, inaccessible to human memory… In Martina Goetze Vinci’s painting we seem to follow endlessly a sort of “Aleph”, the way indicated by Borges, a starting point to which all things return and to which all things tend in the circularity of the Universe. The essential references are mysterious for Martina when she paints female and male figures. Dreamlike vertigo. Dualism of body and spirit. Old and new expectations. The connection with Borges continues. The imminence of a revelation, this is how in 1950 the Argentinian writer-poet defined the esthetic fact. “Music, states of happiness, mythology, faces sculpted by time, certain sunsets and certain places, they all want to tell us something, or said something we should not have lost, or are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation, which does not manifest, is perhaps the aesthetic fact.” (The Wall and the Books, in Other Inquisitions) One example is an iconic canvas such as “The Pheonix” or the series of tribal dancers. The interpretation of a strong, uninhibited, solitary femininity, the expression of a physical presence that attracts us: In the immediacy of her artistic language, Martina’s voice has gained the interest of a varied and attentive audience in the current multiform artistic scenario. The most recent works accentuate the physiognomy of colour through the prevailing use of complementary colours underlined by contrasting tones. The flow of the darker mark on the white of the backgrounds makes the entire narration “light”. Because white, pure and light, contains all colours of the spectrum and opens them like fireworks, insinuating the heat of eros. Martina has participated in several exhibitions in Milan (“Human Landscapes”), Rome (“Roma Margutta” with the factory Officina Lombarda), in Paris and Miami, to mention but a few. The successfully dynamic reflections on the image of woman at times encounter the fascinating subject of the “couple”, they speak of Love. From passion embodied in a sensual dance as in “Tango” to the “Embraces”, mysterious and highly erotic: all is against the tide, in a time which declares itself without poetry and hostile to love (or at least today’s literary figures would have it so). For Martina, no. The inspiration is intense, it is an arrow through the heart. Like love for Alda Merini: the real essence of her poetry and her life. Dramatic love, free of schemes, of feelings of guilt. But it is Love. Always. Ieri sera era amore, io e te nella vita fuggitivi e fuggiaschi con un bacio e una bocca come in un quadro astratto… Yesterday evening it was love, you and I in life fugitives and runaways with a kiss and a mouth as in an abstract painting… Alda Merini – from “Ieri sera era amore”, “Yesterday evening it was love” It is the cold shadow of the eclipse, as for Mario Luzi, when love dies. Non andartene, non lasciare l’eclisse di te nella mia stanza… Don’t go don’t leave the eclipse of you in my room… Mario Luzi – from “Non andartene”, “Don’t go” And so is Martina Goetze Vinci’s artistic experimentation, inexorable, constant. Her growth as a woman through art. And as an artist, through her life as a woman in the present. In each work a surprising narrative enigma appears, not related to conceptual formula: an unsettling mark of experience which becomes the evocative force of the imagination, ready to recreate unchecked connections in the imagination. Oxymorons in their contrasts and at the same time complementary in imaginary time, projecting into the infinite. At times provocative in contents which explore personal, psychic and emotional experience, interrelated. Martina has her own cultural contexts which sustain linguistic rules expressing signs, metaphors and symbols. From the results reached, to the point of departure for future artistic journeys. Painting, again. Perhaps sculpture, who knows. An interior model with significant coherence, lyrically incisive and intellectually clear in its forms and its content. F.B.M.