Dani Marti: What the Weaver Saw
A great presence waits on a far wall. Even from a distance we know it is not a painting, its three-dimensionality is obvious; in the peaks and troughs of its columns and rows, in the depth of the shadow it casts around its giant form, in the way it seems to crouch, rather than to hang on the wall. The presence is a grid: a gargantuan, woven grid. We know the grid: our houses are increasingly built into the grid, our cities are governed by the grid, we move in cars and trains across and over and under the grid; Foucault told us in Discipline and Punish that it channels, measures and controls our lives – but we bury this knowledge, unearthing it only when we take flight and are free from it – when we see it exposed from the window of a plane – or when we scrape back to the bones of a building – unearthing the skeletal traces of the squares and rectangles that will grow up and around and over us.
Artist Dani Marti does not ignore the grid. Instead he confronts it through the undertaking of a lengthy, difficult and often tortuous process; the age-old art of weaving. Marti first began learning weaving at school when he was eight years old. At thirteen he took a course of lessons outside of school. These stopped as the teenage years took over, and he transferred his attentions to painting, but by 1998, Marti found himself increasingly frustrated with painting’s inherent flatness. Feeling too limited by the medium and drawn by his attraction to the sensuality of materials and his desire to explore the possibilities of surface, Marti began to weave again. He started with industrial materials- protective fencing, tubular mesh used for muscle farming, and mesh produced for protective and packing purposes, sailing ropes and climbing ropes – and he began to create intricate surfaces ‘which’, he said ‘could be embedded with meaning’.
Since that time, Marti has continued to weave his grids. The works have varied in size, from 30x30x cm to 260×600 cm. Some are free standing sculptures such as the small tutti-fruiti coloured cube Linda, (2001), and the colossal straw-yellow Throughman (the yellow peril) (2005); others are wall-hangings – flattened cages that, like paintings, occupy a fixed position on the wall. Of the two forms Marti’s woven works take, the wall-hangings are the most confrontational; the free-standing sculptures can be viewed from all sides (thereby inviting various possibilities of engagement), but the wall-based works force the viewer to look and appraise from a ‘one on one’ vantage point. Either way, Marti’s work is about as far from painting as it is possible to be. It is viscerally sculptural in a way that is both compellingly attractive in terms of the tactile nature of the materials Marti employs, and forbidding in its density and compactness.
The sculptures vary in terms of materials from heavy duty nylon and rubber, to polyester, coloured rope, chains and even strings of second-hand beaded necklaces, as in the sparklingly colourful The Pleasure Chest, (2007), (a piece formed from approximately four hundred second hand beaded necklaces and Spanish rosary beads collected between 2000 and 2003. The work is a collective portrait of hundreds of women. Behind each necklace lies a history, and the work still carries the smell of the different women in each beaded piece). Through the act of weaving, Marti makes the grid visible. Not only that, he transforms it into a ‘body’ that can occupy and interact with the space of its surroundings. These ‘bodies’ have an immense, and at times, almost overwhelming physicality – particularly those works that are formed from heavy-duty materials such as European Monarchs (Felipe), (2005) (a mammoth sculpture formed from stainless steel hose, polypropylene and nylon rope and supported on a wooden frame).
Each of Martis’ ‘bodies’ possesses a uniqueness of character and a distinct individuality that suggests something living. At first glance, a series such as Variations in a Serious Black Dress, (2003-2004), may appear to be an exercise on the theme of the black square, yet though Marti might construct a format that can be repeated (evoking the idea of a prototype that can be adopted and adapted for different ends), the resulting works can never be identical, never be exactly replicated because of the nature of each work’s construction. Indeed each ‘body’s’ unique identity is established prior to construction because Marti ‘names’ each work before he even begins it. Thus the ‘bodies’ can be read as portraits – whether of intriguing figures from history, such as Beatrice Cenci (a tragic figure from the late Renaissance, beheaded for murdering her brutal, abusive father), who inspired a series of works Marti made for a show in Brescia, Italy; or of fictional characters; or of people known to Marti personally such as Linda (2001), George (2001); Monika (submerged in glittering shadows) (2008), and Andrea (greeted by a pubescent smile) (2008). When Marti makes a series of works about one particular person, the challenges he faces are how to convey the essence of the person within the sculptural surface? The colour, the materials, the pattern and the surface all have to pull together. The work is about how to search for the core of someone, how to take an ‘emotional’ likeness.
Some of Marti’s woven ‘portraits’ are accompanied by videos. These might be interpreted as sketches – ‘observational drawings’ which serve as a kind of anthropological record of Marti’s subjects and allow him to become familiarised with the most intimately personal details of his subjects’ lives. Although Marti sees the video work as a very necessary part of his overall practice, he does not show every video he makes – some are only for him. The works he does display forge a strong dialogue with their woven counterparts. One such example is Bolted, (2008) (a three-screen video installation that runs on a 41-minute loop and records the subject, David, at home in Glasgow). The film follows David’s daily routines and his unique relationship with and response to his private space, a two bedroom tenement flat, decorated in different shades of beige. Marti exhibited the piece in conjunction with three beige and black sculptures entitled Beige (2008), each woven from rubber, nylon and leather, and displayed leaning against the wall opposite the video installation. The work was installed at Casula Power House, Liverpool, Australia, in 2008.
Marti’s approach to ‘taping’ his subjects is similar to the one he adopts in his woven work: In both he attempts to probe the psychology of the sitter, to violate their private space through the creation of a claustrophobic relationship. The intensity of the bond created between artist and subject is apparent in the videos and in the woven pieces. The works reveal Marti’s obsession with ‘capturing’ or ‘trapping’ his subject in a manner that plays first into the scopophillic realms of voyeurism, and then – through the suggestibility of certain materials in the woven works, such as chains and rubber – into the world of sado-masochism.
Yet as much as Marti’s works are about the physicality of material, they are also about the suggestibility of colour. For example, in the evocatively titled triptych, Shadow after Shadow, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother Aged 73, (2007), Marti uses black as the predominant colour, weaving through flashes of blue to resemble water, or tears. He reinforces the possibilities of interpretation introduced by colour, through his choice of materials; so the polypropylene and nylon rope he chooses for Shadow after Shadow, Portrait of the Artist’s Mother Aged 73 is the antithesis of the fragile beads he employs for a work such as The Pleasure Chest. Hard-wearing and strong, the material’s appearance suggests an enduring resilience and depth, whereas The Pleasure Chest is deliberately more superficial, a mass of riotous colour and a complicated network of interwoven, glistening forms.
The ‘bodies’ or ‘entities’ Marti creates are brimming with narrative possibilities. Standing in front of the work, reading the titles he has chosen, and considering the sometimes unusual nature of the materials he opts to work with – materials such as the marabou feathers he weaves together to create Portrait of Joni as a fallen Angel crying behind the wall (2006), we are caught up in the twists and turns that Marti presents to us. Weaving has long been associated with story-telling, with the narrator described as the ‘weaver’ of tales. The most fantastical stories are described as ‘yarns’ or ‘ripping yarns’ words that suggests a romping, physical act grounded in materiality, and it is not a tall order to describe Marti as a story teller. His works are full of imaginings and the twists and turns of his ropes are ideal metaphors for his protagonists’ lives.
Jane Neal is a UK-based writer and curator. She contributes to a wide variety of international arts publications including Art Review, Modern Painters, Flash Art and Art in America and writes regularly for the British national newspaper, The Telegraph.