Portraiture is the challenge accepted by Dani Marti: how to represent not only an other individual, but also a situated set of relationships, be they physical, psychological, erotic, imaginary? Likeness alone, physical resemblance within representation, is inadequate.  Likeness must take its place alongside a host of more abstract qualities and concepts, such as presence, impression, inconsistency, projection, desire, will, time and place.  And this other being that the portrait wishes to capture is already enmeshed within representation, an intricate fabric of codified signs and conventional expectations.  To approach the “real” of the other, we need to somehow risk venturing beyond the comfort of the familiar.  We must be prepared to confront the disconcerting incomprehensibility of otherness itself.  For ‘otherness’ is not solely a quality of all that is non-self, it is also a quality that pervades and threatens to undermine the self. Remember Rimbaud: “Je est un autre.” Remember Sartre: “Hell is other people.” Under such circumstances, as Marti demonstrates, the conventional strategies of portraiture – its reliance upon, among others, likeness, verifiability, consistency and an appeal to traditional humanist values – are no longer sufficient to accommodate this complexity. New modes of analogy and homology, for example, will be called upon.  Abstraction and connotation will operate on a par with figuration and denotation; the differing densities and tensions of woven fibres and textured surfaces will signify individuality as much as moving human images on a flat, bright screen; and fact will share equal status with fiction, desire and fantasy.  In order to reveal, the portrait must not congeal.  John Calcutt 

Exhibition Catalogue 

Video link: ‘Braveheart’ 2006