‘The art of tying ends’,
Exhibition Text,
Sherman Galleries, Sydney, 2006
Dani Martí was born in Spain, lived in Australia, and recently moved to Glasgow. This bi-cultural condition, the feeling of not sitting squarely within either culture, is central to his work as it shows us how he (re)builds his own identity and how he faces the challenge of fitting in a different culture, being at home, but not.
And maybe this situation can help us understand the driving forces behind his work which, on different levels, function perfectly binomial: minimalist-neo-baroque, catholic-protestant, reasonable-emotional, natural- synthetic, local-global, quiet-tense, excessive-restraint, mystic-erotic, dominant-submissive, painterly-sculptural, industrial-handmade, or innocent-perverted.
This ambivalent quality represents subtly the complexity of Neo-Baroque society in which the subject is desperately looking for illusions and dystopias of excess because he is aware that harmony and happiness is no more than a mirage. And Martí’s compositions are exactly a beautiful mirage, a seductive mirror that gives us back an uneasy -and even unpleasant- image of ourselves, but at the same time providing us with a better interpretation of the world.
SENSE OF GUILT
Nuclear to Martí is his Catholic breeding and background as it informs literally, formally, and conceptually his artistic practice. It is appropriate to remind that in Catholic societies life still revolves around the concept of “guilt”, whereas in Anglo-Saxon societies “duty” determines the course of life. This pristine sense of guilt goes back as far as the Baroque where the separation between body and mind lead to highly paradoxical artistic representations. Like Bernini’s Saint Theresa, the works here presented under the series The Seven Pleasures of Snow White or Un fraile y un muchacho (Take 1 and 2) suggest a state of quasi orgasm. The dwarfs, monsters, buffoons, and bearded women that inhabit Spanish culture since the Golden Age until today –think of Velázquez, Goya, Buñuel and Almodóvar-, become in the hands and eyes of Martí an evidence of a forever turbulent and dramatic world vision. The body –as Cuban writer Severo Sarduy would have stated-, our culture’s great sacrificed, returns with the violence of the repressed to the exclusion scene.
And this set of allegorical and apparently minimalist paintings –I say paintings as I consider Marti’s work an exercise of “expanded” painting and a clear example of what painting can mean these days- are carried out in a clean, meticulous, and obsessive way. The Baroque fold –hundreds of ropes and cables which here fold and unfold endless- and infinitely- conforms together with the horror vacui –every orifice is formally and conceptually filled by the artist- and the vanitas –the reminder of the fugacity of our lives- a passionate labyrinth where the complex relationship between body, eroticism, and power is put into question reflecting societies’ social, political and philosophical crisis.
THE HELL OF THE BEAUTIFUL
The artist penetrates into what Karl Rosenkranz called “The Hell of the Beautiful”. Thus Martí creates a narrative whose coordinates are revealed by its somewhat deleuzian titles: A Hundred Lashes, Fascist Desire, White Holes, A Flow of Intensities, A Body Without Organs, Pablo (The Impossible Dream), Un fraile y un muchacho (Take 1 and 2), and Throughman (The Yellow Peril). The moral tension –according to Rosenkranz- is caused by beauty, which camouflages the real and distracts injustice, a beauty that goes beyond good and evil, that expresses the beautiful through the ugly, the real through the false, live through death. This provokes of course, as these compositions clearly show, ambivalent experiences and impossible conciliations: pleasure and political engagement, conformism and rebellion, spirituality and sensuality.
Knitting represents an act of bondage, a ritual which enables the artist to “possess” the portrayed person. Esthetics, pleasure, fantasy, and security come into play while Martí carefully tries not to press too tight in order to be able to untie his “slave” in less than 1 minute, never leaving him/her alone and especially if he/she is gagged. Foucault’s ideas about violence as an exercise of power which affects (negatively) freedom and the dignity of the other arise under a new light. It’s a question of faith, of mutual consensus.
Ecstasy pills, flakes, sacred hosts; these cool, geometric, luxurious, and virginal paintings reveal a highly controlled passion for knitting. Maybe we can consider this back-to-labour a challenge of superficial ideas about memory, traditions and globalisation. After all, by using an “impure” and popular discipline like “knitting”, the work talks about social interaction, politics, and even the aim for self-sufficiency. (But let’s not forget that “impureness” is globalization’s trademark.) And knitting was a tradition his grandmother clung to; nevertheless the artist had to learn it himself.
Martí looks deep inside his phillias and phobias, his dreams and disappointments for order, perfection, and redemption, and he does so in an allegorical way. His works are rich allegories in a benjaminian sense, id est, they regain its original meaning where any person, object or relation can mean anything else. And in a world desperately in need of allegory, it becomes a powerful instrument to understand today’s crisis zeitgeist.
In The Seven Pleasures of Snow White Dani Martí exposes the torture of our spirits, our desire for emancipation in a visceral, suffocating, and vomitive way. Just straight from the intestines/ guts, as (neo)Baroque.
Paco Barragán
1 In this context, one might quote Irit Rogoff when he states that “In a previous formation there was a necessary alliance between identity (being Red, being French, being Muslim) and the placing of that identity within a national, regional or cultural location (being Turkish, being Northern European, being of the art world). In the current moment, however, the mutual dependence of these two categories has been loosening in intriguing ways. Irit Rogoff, “The Where of Now”, in catalogue exhibition TIME ZONES: Recent Film and Video, Tate Modern, curated by Jessica Morgan and Gregor Muir, October 2004, p. 87.
2 Remember the Protestant theologian John Calvin’s attack against Catholic ascetic lifestyle when he writes in European Origins of American Thought: “If we are to pass through the earth, we ought undoubtedly to make such a use of its blessings as will rather assist than retard us in our journey.” (Van Tassel and McAharen, 1969, 11-12).
3 It might be interesting to note that Martí has been recently shortlisted by Barry Schwabsky, Karen Wright, and Javier Panera for the II Castellón County Council International Painting Prize (Spain), one of the few contests dedicated to expanded painting in the world (see www.dipcas.es/paintingprize.htm ).
4 The horror vacui Baroque has not been eliminated but, on the contrary, exacerbated by the high tech communications and the global visual culture which continue to define urban life.
5 I recently co-curated with Javier Panera and Omar Pascual an exhibition on this subject called Baroque and Neo-Baroque. The Hell of the Beautiful at the Domus Artium (DA2) in Salamanca, Spain (see www.e-flux.com 10/15/05 ).
6 Conversation with the artist in Madrid on 12th November 2005.
7 Íbid 6.
8 Paco Barragán is an independent curator based in Madrid.