“my artistic method constitutes some sort of emotional minimalism.”

Born in Barcelona, Spain in 1963,  Dani Marti has become one of the most prominent artists of the world’s plastic scene. His  work explores several plastic languages, and he has a career that positions him as one of the more important personalities in contemporary art. Ee talked with him about his work: of how referrals from the baroque, natural to an excessive world, lead him to a minimalistic work, and of how he goes beyond the bi- dimensional limit to reach out to a sculptural painting.

You are from Spanish origin, but have lived a long time in Australia and during the last years you have lived between that country and Scotland. Do you believe that your origins, as well as your experiences in those countries have reflected upon your work, in the particular use of materials and techniques such as weaving?

I went to Australia when I was 24 years old. As a child I always enjoyed drawing and manual crafts, which I abandoned when I reached adolescence. I was raised during the seventies, a decade when there was a lot of interest in manual crafts and textiles. It was during my primary school years with the Jesuits that I learned how to do coarse lacework. It became an obsession to create a surface, a plane in space starting from a single line. I knit belts, dresses and tapestries. I ended up studding business in Barcelona and in 1989 I came to Australia. While I worked at the Spanish chamber of commerce in that country I started to play Cth several industrial products, such as ropes, nets, sponges and reflectors, almost in a “ready made” form, and I used again the knitting and sowing techniques learned during my preadolescence. That is how my first works came to life. At the age of 33 I decided to study Art at the College of Fine Arts in Sydney.

Baroque obsession

I point this out because in your works I see certain baroque influence, as much contextually as formally speaking.

Absolutely! Remember I was raised in Spain. I breathed for many years the aesthetic, iconography and sense of guilt of the Catholic Church. I still remember  when  as a little  boy I ran  terrified  out of a temple after seeing the image of  Christ  crucified  bathed  in agony. . . The cult to pain and suffering! Baroque is overloaded, excessive and irrational. There is obviously an obsession in my work, as much in my paintings and sculptures as in the videos I make. I like to work with excess, with visceral feelings, with shadow, the ornament and pornography, but all contained  within  a minimalist aesthetic. The work I do comes from a lyric intuition that appeals to the intellect in an emotional way, because it binds sense and sentiment. Bondage, torture, an insatiable need to poses, to capture the imperceptible… These are the cravings that move and nurture my work, the processes of arbitration between the particular and the universal, the concrete and the abstract. It is also nurtured by the dialectic between a formal minimalism and craftsmanship, between an elitist art and a decorative art.

This leads us to your sculptures and your wall pieces being a mixture between asceticism or Anplo-Saxon  formalism  so proper of minimalism and the exuberance more proper of Latin countries. Do you agree with this appreciation?

The formal Anglo-Saxon aesthetic aspects, -that simplicity of feature, simplicity of construction  — act   as   sensorial triggers that induce the viewer to a state of re0exive conscience, to an open observation that encourages him to observe and experiment the  work  on  his own terms, without interpretations or intermediaries. It all  began with the black obelisk in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey by Stanley Kubrick. For me it was a very visceral experience, far from any intellectual prevention. Later on I got in contact  with the  work of the Malevich brothers, Ad Reinhard and his monochrome black paintings. It was hard for me to understand them, but it was only reinterpreting and feeling them that I achieved a lecture of them, even if it was a “wrong” or subjective one.

My reinterpretation lead me to make weaved objects, totally black, with heavily textured surfaces by the use of road and other industrial materials. Instead of providing them a minimalist lecture, I decided to saturate the object with feeling, and sexualize the work overloading it with a sensuality that invites to physical contact. I’m interested in creating contemplative paintings and sculptures, and at the same time subversive pieces, abstract and literal, void at first sight of any reference, being the titles what propose to the viewer a more extended lecture, a fractioned narrative. It is a “what you see is what you see” of Frank Stella, but in my case there are many more, since the work is at the end the personification of a determined obsession.

How would you define the relationship between your wall pieces such as Becoming Animal or A Body Without Organs form the series “The Seven Pleasures of Snow White” that work as paintings and a sculpture such as Troughman (the yellow peril)?

They are both an extension of my work and the approach the same longings that constitute my work . What  changes is the way in which the audience experiments and reads the a piece . I’ve worked more on the wall pieces, and I even prefer them over the floor pieces, as the relationship between the work and the viewer is a much more direct confrontation. I’m interested in creating a surface, a skin. But instead of applying oil on canvas, I weave the canvas and it is during that process that the paint struggles against its own dimensional limitations  and I try to expand into a sculptural space. I’m interested in creating a surface, a sample of an unlimited universe.

The floor sculptures I make use as much a formal aesthetic, with the cube as its main expression, as an unstructured esthetic, of a more organic character. In many occasions, the sculpture constitutes a conceptual extension of the painting. In the case of Troughman (the yellow peril)2006, which was inspired by a famous gay character of the Australian night circles, the cube with its five exposed surfaces manifests a strong physical presence. This conveys the sensation that the woven structure covers a reality that is barely reachable for the viewer. When I work with sculpture I like to establish a direct dialog with the main representative works of the seventies minimalism – Judd, Andre, Morris- and reinterpret them in terms of form, concept and materials. My artistic work constitutes a sort of “emotional” minimalist.

You have also done several public art sculptures in Australia, such as Ruin, Trouble with the weather or Off my noodle. Could you talk us about what it means to you to do public art? How do you understand the relationship with the public?

I greatly enjoy doing public art, above all when the viewers are allowed to interact with the given proposal. Public art allows the spectator to immerse even further in the piece and increase the experience level. For example, the temporal public piece I did in Newcastle –Off my noodle (2007)-, was located in a conflictive part of the city, and the day after it was inaugurated people began to dismember and destroy it, making it their own. It was great! During the following days you saw a lot of people in the streets playing with the pool tubes, -‘pool noodles’- that constituted the piece.

Another of my sculptural installations -Orifices (2001) – was made out of red plastic sponges used for washing dishes. They formed large red islands that symbolised blood, and the public was invited to bare their feet, lay down and play on them. During the time the installation was open I went each day to the gallery and sewed the sponges together, to make the islands bigger. The installation was a response to the prejudices associated with AIDS. I associated the public body with the  private body. It is important that the public is immerse and interacts to promote dialog.

Finally, also in your videos — as for example the Insideout project- the notions of public versus private space play an important part. Can you explain us how this connection is materialized between these concepts of your sculpture and your videos?

I started to work on videos when I moved to Glasgow in 2004 to make a master in arts at the Glasgow School of Art. So when I came to this place, I devoted a year to filming in a very intuitive way, jumping from one project to another. It wasn’t until after that year was over that what motivated me to filming became evident: it was the same obsession that moved my paintings and sculptures: the act of portraying and more concretely the impossibility to do so.  In many occasions I use my sexuality as an instrument to get intimately closer to my subjects and thus create a closer, more claustrophobic space. There are a lot of similarities between both the filming and knitting process, its intensity, its physical component and its obsession. During the last years the connection between my videos, paintings and sculpture is more latent. In most cases behind a work there is a video with a narrative, a title, a psychic and an experiecne. They are two independent processes, but interconnected at the same time.

Currently I keep on travelling and living in Australia, Scotland and a bit in Spain. Not belonging to any particular culture and to all of them at the same time helps me be a greater observer, to watch without any intention of interpreting, without the need of contextualizing any given culture. O•