DANI MARTI MARTI
Maitland Regional Art Gallery acknowledges the Wonnarua People, the traditional custodians and owners of the land. We acknowledge the unbroken connection to country, culture and community and we extend this respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People who visit and engage with the Gallery.
MARTI DANI MARTI OH CANOLA!
NOTE FROM MRAG
Over a year ago, a highly spirited conversation took place between Dani Marti and the team here at MRAG. From very early on, it became clear this exhibition was going to be ambitious and transformative. Marti’s poetic eye and technically brilliant hand transforms the Gallery into a vision of shimmering, gutsy landscapes. Not only is he an ‘extremophile’ as Lisa Slade acutely observes, Dani Marti is also the kind of artist with an unwavering conviction to create work that transports you to places far away, making you feel and see colour and place through the most unlikely materials. We would like to thank Dr Lisa Slade for her accompanying essay where her generous insight takes us to new places and ideas when looking at this exhibition. Dani Marti also received Australia Council funding for this exhibition and we are grateful for the production support this provided to realise the breadth of his ideas and the scale of the work presented here. Curated by Kim Blunt with exhibition and catalogue design by Clare Hodgins, Oh Canola! proudly showcases the work of an international artist working in our region and we are delighted to present it to our audience here in Maitland.
GERRY BOBSIEN
Extremophile DANI MARTI
Oh Canola! These were the words Dani Marti cried with a gusto befitting a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical when he first saw the vast fields of canola set against cerulean skies in South Australia in 2019. Two years later and this experience has translated into a major body of work, indeed an entire exhibition, for Maitland Regional Art Gallery.
Marti lives in Cessnock and his studio, somewhat appropriately, is a former grain store that is now transformed into a site of creative industry and energy. Marti is an extremophile – he is someone who thrives in extreme environments and scenarios – and for the past
Extremophile
thirty years he has lived between Glasgow, Barcelona (his Catalonian birthplace) and Cessnock. In addition to his global travels, he has in more recent times taken to the road, preferring to sleep under the stars in rural and remote locations, and it is these travels that have transformed his practice and led to this exhibition.
Marti is perhaps best known for his woven portraits that describe, with raw honesty but bereft of judgement, this messy business of being human, to paraphrase writer Carrie Miller. Represented in major collections across the country, he has developed a singular and poetic signature that brings together
customised ropes made for him in his birthplace and other materials, including reclaimed costume jewellery, to create portraits. More an emotional and sensual conjuring than a physical likeness, these portraits are rendered in the warp and weft of woven relief sculptures. Alongside these ‘paintings’, as Marti calls them, is a moving-image practice in which he expresses self-ethnography (a simultaneous writing of the self and of those he encounters) with a filmic tenebrism reminiscent of the Spanish Baroque paintings of his upbringing. Imagine the love child of Velázquez and David Lynch.
In Oh Canola! Marti’s constant muse of portraiture gives way to landscape. The titular work of the exhibition incorporates more than 10,000 vivid yellow customised reflectors, the type used on vehicles to aid visibility, on a field spanning over eleven metres. Uniting the languages of abstraction and landscape – arguably Australia’s most vexed and historically laden genres – Marti recreates the sensation of the monumental field, capturing the optical dazzle and energising warmth of the golden canola. His works engender a type of synaesthesia, whereby we ‘feel’ colour and ‘see’ sensation. Marti describes the works as possessing ‘a robust sense of themselves as
objects and entities that are deserving of our attention’. They infuse the gallery with a yellow glow, shifting how we perceive space and reorienting us, just as our experience of landscape can.
The kinesis of Oh Canola! with its strong diagonal vibrations gives way to textural depth of Almost Square (llacunes rosades). Here landscape is reborn not as an optical encounter but as textural immersion – an ironic reversal of the reflectors’ primary purpose of aiding vision. Inspired by the pink salt lakes of south-eastern Australia (a source hinted at in the Catalan subtitle, which translates as Pink Lagoons), Marti has manipulated the circular perfection of each
reflector to craft textures redolent of the crystalline salt endemic to the lakes. It’s no accident that they also resemble misshapen Baroque pearls. Pink lakes are hyper-saline environments whose hue is caused by a type of bacterium, defined as extremophile as it thrives in environments that others cannot tolerate. The salt content and volume are also a register of this continent’s age – Marti as a recent arrival has a deep appreciation that he lives on ancient, unceded Country. Venturing into landscape as a non-Indigenous artist is far from uncomplicated and he brings to this new work his distinctive and abiding interest in intimacy. Marti offers us an experience that
is deeply personal and, however obscured or contorted through the arduous process of heating and manipulation, his customised reflectors remain ‘reflective’ of each of us and of our own experiences.
Marti’s family history, specifically his father’s practice as a laparoscopic surgeon, is brought to bear in Natura Morta sota les estrelles (variacions en gris i vert), in which melted Tupperware in variations of grey and green form a visceral and intimate interior landscape, as though one is peering into the human body through keyhole surgery. More abstract expressionism than minimalism, the former domestic containers now appear like torn ligaments and
exposed organs. The work’s title – which translates as ‘still life under the stars’ – points to Marti’s collapsing of the traditionally opposing forces and genres of interior versus exterior and still life versus landscape. In Un cant d'ocell, birdsong is translated into eight panels of rhythmic ropes that approximate the horizontal staves and vertical notes of a musical score. Like a composition, the lateral ropes measure time or duration while the perpendicular ones suggest pitch, together creating a soothing visual lullaby for the viewer. Elsewhere in Nude (after Teresa), Marti’s reminiscences of a close friend – a fashion designer with a penchant for nude hues – takes form as a suspended
sculpture comprised entirely of ostrich feathers. The hovering lightness and fragility of this work contrasts with the robust and dense materiality of the woven works.
Lurching from the gallery wall, Gàrgola is at once menacing and protective as it overlooks the landscape, like its namesake the gargoyle. Its body, woven rhythmically in uniform dark olive-coloured ropes, resembles a type of armour. Marti cites his viewing of samurai armour at the Metropolitan Museum in New York many years ago as a key source of inspiration and he has employed the same knot used in the body-wrapping forms of the samurai’s garments to create Gàrgola.
The landscape that Gàrgola protects is one that Marti has made with indefatigable energy and industry over the past two years. The last work completed for the exhibition, Gàrgola stands as a sentinel to Marti’s endurance and creativity, defining the frontier of an artist who works at the extreme.
DR LISA SLADE
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UN CANT D’OCELL 2022, polyester, aluminium 222 × 457 × 10 cm
ALMOST SQUARE llacunes rosades - T2
GÀRGOLA 2022, polyester 150 × 103 × 80 cm
ALMOST SQUARE llacunes rosades - T1
2022, customised reflectors, powder coated aluminium 250 × 260 × 10 cm each (1-4)
OH CANOLA! 2022, customised reflectors, aluminium, 282 × 1160 × 5.5 cm
NATURA MORTA variacions en gris i verd NATURA MORTA variacions en gris
NATURA MORTA variacions en gris i negra
ALMOST SQUARE de pedra i formigó - T1
ALMOST SQUARE de pedra i formigó - T2
powder coated aluminium 400 × 526 × 125 cm
2021, polyproplene, powder coated aluminium 190 × 190 × 26 cm each
BETWEEN entre dues fondaries
2021, polyproplene, aluminium 260 × 174 × 9 cm
Dani would like to thank his studio assistants Destiny, Jada, Indiah and Matt.
The artwork in this exhibition is made from over 26,000 customised reflectors - shaped and threaded, 500 recycled polyproplene fast food trays and endless trips to charity shops in Maitland, Kurri Kurri and Cessnock to source a extensive range of Tupperware and plastic food containers, 600m of boas made out of customised ostrich feathers and close to 3000m of customised dark olive polyester rope.
Dani Marti is represented by GAGPROJECTS | Greenaway Art Gallery, Adelaide; ARC ONE GALLERY, Melbourne; and Dominik Mersch Gallery, Sydney.
First published in 2022 by Maitland Regional Art Gallery, PO Box 220, Maitland NSW, 2320 to accompany the exhibition Oh Canola! Dani Marti
Exhibition dates: 05 March - 29 May 2022
Gallery Director: Dr Gerry Bobsien
Exhibition Curators: Dani Marti, Kim Blunt
Gallery Coordinator: Celeste Aldahn
Exhibition Officer: Linden Pomaré
Foreword: Dr Gerry Bobsien
Essay: Dr Lisa Slade
Editing: Dr Gerry Bobsien, Cheryl Farrell, Kim Blunt, Anne McLaughlin Graphic design and artwork photography: Clare Hodgins
© Maitland Regional Art Gallery | All images copyright of the artist
ISBN: 978-0-6487348-6-4
Catalogue proudly printed in Australia by Jennings Print Group.
Maitland Regional Art Gallery is a service of Maitland City Council and is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
