Floating into space
May 7 2003
By Robert Nelson
VISUAL ARTS: DANI MARTI
Portrait of a Young Man Returning a Ladybird to the Grass
Arc One @ Span, city, until May 9
Sculpture is sometimes pictorial, and pictures are sometimes sculptural. At times, you can’t decide if a work is one or the other. For example, Dani Marti weaves sculptures out of ropes. They stand proud from the wall by several centimetres, but present rather like abstract paintings. The patterns caused by the grainy weave recall the polarising and scintillating effects of Op Art. They are paintings made out of rope or sculpture in the guise of painting.
Marti’s exhibition appeals to painting, in spite of the burly nylon cables that could tow a truck or moor an oil tanker. The materials belong to heavy industry but the way that they’re organised and manipulated refers to painting. His works concurrently showing at Gitte Weise in Sydney are mostly very dark, perhaps referring to the tradition of “black paintings” from Goya to conceptualism.
But Marti’s objects don’t feel like paintings. The surface isn’t really a surface, since its material constantly dives from view and resurfaces when it’s looped past another rope.
Your gaze almost disappears into the weave. The surface is uncanny, exaggerated, fierce: it has an untoward volume, not exactly rugged because it’s also regular and patterned. And yet even the way that the hefty fibres snake in and out of the plane refers to painting, for most easel paintings are created on a woven support (canvas) that Marti’s constructions parody.
These works have a striking visuality, with marvellous associations and references. But having hit upon such a great ruse, where will the artist take the metaphors and materials in the future?
Robert Nelson