Fruit is an ancient metaphor for human flesh; plastic, a new one.

Featuring Dani Marti’s signature melted plastics and nylon ropes, Summer Fruits is a cornucopia. The exhibition is rich mix of conflicting textures—the calm and the storm, loud and soft, kinky and vanilla. Literally bulging from the walls, these artworks have an overt sensuality. They flirt. Yet beware of simple summer joys, lest they contain something risky. Several round pieces in the show serve multiple roles: a planet, a nipple, a mirror, a brain, and a target all at once. Like enjoying a delicious treat on a hot day, take a bite of Watermelon is a summer fruit (2024), feel the juice flood your mouth and let it slide down your throat.

One of the most unforgettable moments in the history of children’s television is The Magic School Bus episode ‘Inside Ralphie’, which aired on 10 September 1994. In this quasi-existential animation, Ms Frizzle shrinks her class of students so they can enter the throat of their classmate, Ralphie. They wiggle into his bloodstream, where the students marvel at his red and white blood cells. Not a single child who watched that episode
has ever forgotten it; could your body really be so alien? ‘Inside Ralphie’ was thrilling, a revelation that your living flesh is squirming within you.

As a child, Marti had a similar revelation, as his father was a doctor and a pioneer of laparoscopy. His father’s diagnostic slides introduced the young Marti to dramatically lit, cavernous landscapes within the body—livers, fat deposits, and curious greenish hues, all decorating the slick walls of our insides. In his exhibition Summer Fruits, Marti takes this internal landscape and extrapolates it. The series Messy business of being Human captures the vivid beauty of this memory. These works evoke a psychological moment of simultaneous repulsion and attraction, a budding narrative of sexuality and the dizzy discovery of self.  For Marti, the colour pink is arriscada, which means ‘risky’ in Catalan. A brash, erotic colour—pink is political and gendered. No one is neutral about pink. Despite its divisive social function, Marti considers pink a universal colour. Turn us inside out, we’re all pink under the skin.

Dani Marti, born in 1963 in Barcelona, Spain, currently lives in regional NSW. Over the past 25 years, he has held more than 45 solo exhibitions. In 2022, Marti was honoured with a major mid-career survey titled Oh Canola! at the Maitland Regional Art Gallery, an impressive display devoted to his renowned minimalist style. His work is held in prestigious collections of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León in Spain, Queensland Art Gallery & Gallery of Modern Art, Newcastle Art Gallery, The University of Queensland Art Museum, Art Bank, Chartwell Collection in Auckland, City Art Gallery in Auckland, and the University of Wollongong.