English version
 

Il 10 novembre 2001 è stata inaugurata una mostra personale di Sandro Martini dal titolo “L'invenzione del rosso” presso la Galleria Ulivi a Prato; la mostra è rimasta aperta fino al 10 dicembre 2001 (orario: dal martedì alla domenica, dalle 10.00 alle 13.00 e dalle 15.30 alle 19.30)

Galleria Ulivi - via Curtatone 67 - 59100 Prato - tel. e fax 0574.31306

Sandro Martini è nato a Livorno nel 1941. Verso la fine degli anni Cinquanta si è trasferito a Milano, dove ha tenuto mostre personali in numerose gallerie, tra cui Il Milione e Blu, e spazi espositivi pubblici, come il Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea. Il suo percorso artistico è sempre stato caratterizzato da un'attenzione per le potenzialità allusive del segno, inteso come elemento essenziale non solo del linguaggio pittorico, ma più in generale di ogni attività espressiva. Dai dipinti dei primi anni Sessanta, in cui le forme curvilinee e ondose tendono a frammentare le ampie campiture di colore, alle installazioni degli anni Settanta, in cui gli ambienti vengono saturati di stimoli cromatici e la tela, che fa da supporto alla pittura, si sfrangia in sottili strisce di tessuto colorato. Nelle opere più recenti, spesso realizzate con le tecniche dell'affresco e del collage, la ricerca di Martini si è progressivamente focalizzata su una peculiare trasposizione visiva della dimensione temporale, in cui il flusso cronologico si rapprende.
 
 

In occasione della mostra è stato pubblicato un catalogo delle opere esposte introdotto da testi di Roberto Borghi, Giuseppe Billi e Sandro Martini. La versione in formato .pdf può essere scaricata da questa pagina; il catalogo originale è disponibile presso la Galleria Ulivi a Prato.
 

  April 18 - May 25, 2001, 9:00 am - 6:00 pm, lecture, Inciso come scritto (Engraved as written).
Livorno- born artist Sandro Martini uses a broad range of expressive media, including collages, paintings, installations, and frescoes. This exhibit highlights an important aspect of his work engraving and art book production, with examples of some of his major achievements from 1972 through 1999.
For more information call (415) 788-7142.
The exhibit is located at the Italian Cultural Institute, 425 Washington Street, Suite 200, San Francisco.

RIFODERO CLASS - 21 and 22 April, 2001
Kala Institute, San Francisco.

AFFRESCO - 5 and 6 May, 2001
Kala Institute, San Francisco.

Al Fresco

I see, I see... here, I see now... splashes of tomato sauce, I hear greedy jaws crunching tenacious shells, the initial composure becoming almost a furious hand-to-hand fight...
Here... I see... pasta with lobster...
I see... four or five persons dining in a crowded Tuscan restaurant in Milan, actually I should not have been there I was due to take a plane to New York at dawn the next morning.
A why not? makes me meet Corrado, he too on the point of leaving for Canada.
A coincidence after another, an exchange of addresses, a we’ll meet again, with the certainty - or uncertainty ­ that it will never be, a reference precisely to the Italian Cultural Institute that now brings me back to talk with him about fresco.

Piazza’s black day
Piazza looked at the poplars from the window

how beautiful the Lodi countryside is
when the fog crosses through the trees
and there is no sign of human deed
or presence

and songs do not arise from the canals
and the silence is Purgatory

the apprentices watched Piazza
who turned and said
go, go away
it’s a bad time

and remained by himself
in front of the window
in front of the poplars

that’s how it was before us
the Lodigiano was the earth
free, alone

God my soul is in hell
would the spring not come
and after birth
summer
thought Piazza

Fresco out of duty
every week, for three years, I painted a fresco, four mts. by two, destroyed and painted it again, it renewed itself like Tantalo’s supplice my gym on a scaffolding, I could even smoke and drink wine up there.
I was good at sixteen, I was allowed that.

I see, I see... I see myself.

Once again on a scaffolding, smoking and drinking wine, frescoing a scene fifteen mts. by three in a church of Milan (I have just been told that a priest ill-disposed towards non figurative paintings destroyed it).
As in a dialogue interrupted and resumed after 15 years, I see... I see...
Luciano Moreo, my family doctor (he has saved my life at least 3 or 4 times), announces his son’s marriage, a very special wedding gift is necessary it will be a fresco on one of the newlywed’s house walls.
I like the idea, it’s funny, I am good at it...
Ok. Shortly after another important work order in Milan, then also the daughter of my friend Luciano will get married, and there will be another fresco...

I speak of this last job with the Kala Institute’s Director in S. Francisco.
We plan to promote a course; I meet Stephen and Lucienne, who had been Diego Rivera’s assistants in Mexico and in California for years, they sing Bandiera rossa in Italian to me during the courses’ closing toast.
Since that moment, my appointments with this medium are more and more frequent, I finally realize how fascinating this technique is and what huge possibilities of expression it offers, unluckily mostly confined to a historical reference.

Since then I fight for what I call “lay fresco” there are really few of them in the past.
I impose it on collectors, I paint it on walls or on panels, it goes beyond the often anonymous purchase of a painting.
Diego Rivera and the other muralists painted with a bottle and a revolver on the scaffolding, spied by ambushing fascists.
Many times I did work in front of an audience it is fascinating to see someone painting a fresco.
The wall reacts with a sensitivity of its own to the artist, nailed by the need of completing his work within 4 hours at most.
I paint, beat the dark string, write, scratch, carve, the brush penetrates the fresh mortar, the dense paint moulded by the metal handle rather than by the bristles.
I hate all that is placed, glued on a foreign surface matter and support must coexist in harmony, identify with each other like in watercolours or in engraving through the wound on the plate, damp paper soaks up the ink as canvas or glass or ingobbio absorb paints.
In a fresco, the relationship is chemical as well as physical carbonation crystallizes lime and fixes colour for ever.

Damnation has been interrupted
damnation has been interrupted
with the repentance of having
repented

the return has become emblem
of mosaic fugues

observation has curled into
philosophical wool

I could only regret
the habit of desire

Each time someone presented my fresco course, reference to great masters of the past was inevitable as if, in front of a Picasso engraving, one should need to talk about Dührer.
I really prefer not to talk at all but for unavoidable technical requirements... so that art students can deal with plaster with as few mental trappings as possible.
Artusi’s recipes.

I like to use the metaphor of cooking when talking about painting technique in order to defuse the situation and rouse the creativity that is as likely to exist in a studio as in front of a stove.

Water, pasta, fire and a tomato sauce for colour and flavour, is the result of the cook’s creativity.

Water, lime, pigment and the artist’s inspiration and creativity, will result in a good dish of fresco.

Fresco is noble, teasing, unbending, a small slip can physically and finally compromise the work’s outcome.
Its dignity is worthy of respect, but we should not be made shy by the “white page”, the blank wall waiting for colour, glazing, a tutta pasta, graffito, marmorino, torn plaster.

Painting enters in harmony with architecture, becomes part of it; the great cycles by Tiepolo or Veronese; what prevents us from living space in the same way as contemporaries; in the XVI century, painting accepts the challenge, it is only the second-rate middle-class easel painting of the XIX century that modifies expression, confining painting to the frame and canvas perimetre, to an oily make-up.
But then - permissible question -, what is left of Picasso, Klee, Van Gogh, Manet, all types of avant-garde in a century of painting? A legitimate question.
A sign, a cut on a blank page, has as much dignity and expressiveness as yards of second-rate paintings, a good verse is worth 500 pages of low-rate literature.
The roman popular expression fresconi derives from bad decorators who frescoed...

Without filter
the painter in the end
perhaps sated
surely exhausted leaves aside the oils

and it is days after
that he returns to the brushes
to the cups to the colours

touching them makes him feel good
caressing the spent bristles
rinsing the ancient cups

stowing the colours
now clotted
and the sap in mute slumber

little veins covered
with icing
colours so generous
alive still they were once free
the painter feels the guilt
and leaves the crowded
tables

he wants new brushes
new pigments
new life

pilgrims visit
his forge

the painter uncovers the canvas
he does not say it
but thinks it

this is my body
this is my blood

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