Oh Canola! , 2022,  customised reflectors, aluminium,  282 × 1160 × 5.5 cm

Oh Canola! presents the work of Dani Marti in all its material and textural splendour. Catalan born Marti lives in the Hunter Valley working between Scotland, Spain and the Hunter.

Marti surrenders to his materials transforming common industrial fixings (such as rope, nylon, reflectors) into dramatic and monumental forms to transform the gallery into an immersive,
sensory experience.
5 March – 29 May 2022

Maitland Regional Art Gallery -MRAG

Catalogue essay by Dr Lisa Slade 
Exhibition catalogue   Oh Canola! 
Artist talk – Oh Canola! 

Dani Marti: extremophile

Oh canola! These were the words Dani Marti cried with all of the enthusiasm of a Rogers and Hammerstein musical when he first saw the vast fields of canola set against cerulean skies in South Australia back in 2019. Two years later and this experience has been translated into a major body of work, indeed an entire exhibition, for Maitland Regional Art Gallery. Marti lives in Cessnock and his studio, somewhat appropriately, is a former grain store that is now transformed into a site of creative industry and energy. Marti is an extremophile – he is someone who thrives in extreme environments and scenarios, and for the past thirty years he has lived between Glasgow, Barcelona (his Catalonian birthplace) and Cessnock. In addition to his global travels, he has in more recent times taken to the road, preferring to sleep under the stars in rural and remote locations and it is these travels that have transformed his practice and lead to this exhibition.

Marti is perhaps best known for his woven portraits that describe with raw honesty but bereft of judgement, this messy business of being human, to paraphrase writer Carrie Miller. Represented in major collections across the country, he has developed a singular and poetic signature whereby customised ropes that made in his birthplace and commissioned by the artist, and other materials including reclaimed costume jewellery, are brought together to create a portrait. More an emotional and sensual conjuring than a physical likeness, these portraits are rendered in the warp and weft of the woven relief sculptures. Alongside these ‘paintings’, as Marti calls them, is a moving image practice where self-ethnography (a simultaneous writing of the self and of those he encounters) is rendered with a filmic tenebrism reminiscent of the Spanish Baroque paintings of his upbringing. Imagine the love child of Velázquez and David Lynch.

In Oh canola! Marti’s persistent muse of portraiture has given way to landscape. The eponymous work in the exhibition incorporates more than ten thousand vivid yellow customised reflectors, the type used on vehicles to aid visibility, on a field spanning ten metres. Uniting the languages of abstraction and landscape – arguably Australia’s most vexed and historically-laden genres – Marti recreates the sensation of the monumental field – the optical dazzle and the energising warmth of the golden canola. Engendering a type of synaesthesia, whereby we ‘feel’ colour and we ‘see’ sensation, Marti describes the works as possessing ‘a robust sense of themselves as objects and entities that are deserving of our attention’. They infuse the gallery with a yellow glow, shifting how we perceive space and reorienting us, just as our experience of landscape can.

The kinesis of Oh canola! with its strong diagonal vibrations gives way to textural depth of Almost Square (Llacunes Rosades). Here landscape is reborn not as an optical encounter but as textural immersion – an ironic reversal of the reflectors primary purpose to aid vision. Inspired by the pink salt lakes of south eastern Australia, hinted at in the Catalan subtitle which translates as Pink Lagoons, Marti has manipulated the circular perfection of each reflector to craft textures redolent of the crystalline salt endemic to the lakes. (It’s no accident that they also resemble mis-shaped Baroque pearls.) Pink lakes are hyper-saline environments with the pink hue is caused by a type of bacteria, defined as being by its very nature extremophile as it thrives in environments that others cannot tolerate. The salt content and volume is also a register of this continent’s age – Marti as a recent arrival has a deep appreciation that he lives on ancient, unceded Country. Venturing into landscape as a non-Indigenous artist is far from uncomplicated and Marti brings to this new work his distinctive and abiding interest in intimacy. Marti offers us an experience that is deeply personal and however obscured or contorted through the arduous process of heating and manipulation, his customised reflectors remain ‘reflective’ of each of us and of our own experiences.

Marti’s own family history, specifically his father’s practice as a laparoscopic surgeon, is brought to bear in Natura Morte (Variacions en Gris i Vert) whereby melted Tupperware in variations of grey and green form a visceral interior landscape. Elsewhere in Nude, Marti’s reminiscences of a close friend – a fashion designer with a penchant for nude hues – take form as a suspended sculpture comprised entirely of ostrich feathers. Lurching from the gallery wall is Gàrgula. Like its namesake the gargoyle, it overlooks the landscape and is at once menacing and protective. Its body, woven rhythmically in uniform dark olive green  ropes, resembles a type of armour. Marti’s cites his viewing of Samurai armour at the Metropolitan Museum in New York many years ago as a key source of inspiration and he has employed the same knot used in the body wrapping forms of the Samurai’s garments to create Gàrgula.

The landscape that Gàrgula protects is one that Marti has made with indefatigable energy and industry over the past two years The last work completed for the exhibition, Gàrgula stands as a sentinel to Marti’s enduring and extreme creativity.

Dr Lisa Slade