Maps of thousand moments

Nunzio De Martino's works are at the same time abstract painting, textile, haptic surface, sometimes literally like a relief formed of layered thread stitches. On the one hand, the material and method remain the same, i.e. canvas, threads, sewing machine, the resulting seams form lines, layers, sometimes rippled by the artist leaving perforations needle marks in a machine rhythm like pauses calculated by a metronome. On the other hand, each of his works is a testimony to the struggle between his hands, the matter, and the machine which tugs at the canvas in a steady rhythm.

Visualization strategies

Artworks by Nunzio De Martino have a capacity to create a dream like impression. The surface seems anything but flat, the colors anything but simple, the composition anything but obvious. They have the allure of a vivid element that transport the imagination like image that reveals something real what seem to be not available to a naked eye. Although it may feel like a promise of representing a reality, this mimetic function, or the dilemma of self sufficiency of the image is clearly not the case of De Martino’s work, at least not literally. It well may be that the beholder intuitively lets the associations play within the memory of images from elsewhere, in particular what is seen with the technical support of a microscope or a telescope giving a surprising glimpse into other levels of reality otherwise remaining elusive or completely invisible. Exact sciences use graphics as explanatory tools, interpreting forms and structures of sound waves, light spectrum, molecules, physical and chemical processes. Thanks to popularization of scientific research, these images are not a curiosity, but a part of everyday visual cultural of a modern educated human being. And despite that all, they do not stop to inspire and to fascinate. There is no doubt that especially abstract art, design, and architecture owe these imageries and research a great deal in both senses: formally reproducing forms and rhythms, but also as a spiritual resonance to technical progress and awareness of existence of hidden structures whether of skin tissue or cosmic phenomena.

Photography

In modern times technology based image is nearly always accompanied by medium of photography, but not identical with it. There are several points concerning photography that are relevant in relation with De Martino. His first professional occupation following the graduation form the art academy was photography. There is a deep and complex connection between photography and abstract painting, which some may identify with the black and

white film and altering the colors in the process. Photography disposes of a series of formal effects like blurring the image by movement, manipulating the focus, and therefore playing with depth of the image and revealing or even intensifying textures of surfaces of which the latter is brought by De Martino’s sensibility to a whole different level in his canvases.

Abstraction

There is not a unique genealogy of abstraction in art, nonetheless the connection to technical images and photography certainly is one of its possible roots as well as landscape painting with its notion of space and the essential function of a captured mood. Among a few existing titles of De Martino’s artworks, there are some alluding to landscape or simply calling themselves that which highlights his ties with painting and experience of space. Another strong kinship with abstraction, especially with the one celebrated in American painting of the end of 1950’s and of 1960’s is a rigorous choice of formal limitations: the canvases that are used by the artist are whether with white or black base coat and rarely just raw canvas. There is an important body of works that use only black, white, and red (thread), which are most basic and oldest combination in human culture. Reducing the palette to the archaic chromatism results from the desire to reflect on the beginning and the very base of cultural perception of the image in a way as it was for Barnett Newman with a programmatic series ‘Who is afraid of Red Blue and Yellow’ (1966 70) as contemporary defined primary colors. De Martino’s choice of colors though was inspired by psychological curiosity to see how humans since the beginning of time perceived black, white and red as first colors in culture, and not what modern science of physics teaches, nor modernist paradigm imposes in art. Even if colors of polyester threads come with a considerable variety, the emphasis on the base layer is crucial in De Martino’s works. Many canvases are stitched from separated fragments, often producing combinations with dominant black and white elements. The principle of white or black base coat resulted also in many monochrome compositions.

De Martino creates his artworks primarily and foremost following sensual and intuitive process, although it would be exaggerated to attribute them the etiquette of abstract based on an aleatory performance. His personal gesture is visible as lines of seams meander through the surface. They may remind Gerhard Richter’s so called squeegee paintings, but despite strong parallels and general affinity to Richter’s work, De Martino uses sewing machine forcing it to follow his hand in order to reduce the chance and rigidness of the automated movement.1 It would be more just to say that De Martino’s work may be abstract and it definitely draws its legitimacy from the historical masterpieces, but belongs to the 21st century with its sensibility and sensuality. It is so not because of tools and medium he uses, but because of the cultural issues of today. By stitching fragments together, thinking in layers and recomposing the artist created a method that speaks volumes about the use and reuse of resources, pushing canvas to its material limits as he takes advantage of perforations produced by the machine to unveil the traces of undone seams. Empty dots leave a delicate drawing paced by the fast rhythm of the machine, but instead of silhouettes or shapes it dissolves in a web of seams.

Painting

The image making is a process that involves a continuum and thinking in layers, not in shapes or motifs. There is a visible presence of the oscillation between creating the image as an act and creating it as an accident due to a direct usage of a sewing machine without preexisting exact sketch. Surprisingly, with application of this medium, abstract canvas works celebrate the return of the painterly element and chroma that seems to be absent in abstract painting of the second half of 20th century lured by conceptualist grammar to focus on the idea of a grid, readymade and symbolic references of forms. Every dot of perforation and each seam of polyester manifest the agency and intention of the artist behind the machine, above the canvas, his presence is that of a painter. Although the artworks technically are mainly covered with polyester threads, they are paintings after all.

Knowledge about the early work, unpublished efforts preceding the production finally recognized as an accomplished art, oftentimes might be helpful. The path of De Martino is not unique, but it is not very common for sure either. Being a professional photographer didn’t prevent him from playing around with painting and other media for his own enjoyment and satisfaction. There is no trace of the passage from the photography to stitched canvases, since at the moment he decided to turn to his own artistic practice away from commercial photography, he already knew what he strived for, his visual language was mature, and he was fully aware of the potential of sewing machine and canvas.

Cartographies

Every map is a result of an abstraction. Set of selected data is translated into visual interpretation, so that the image can be read. Cartography like other technical and technology supported images reveal other dimensions to the inhabited reality. Obviously, De Martino’s artworks do not refer to any physical reality external to them. Nonetheless the association sets deeper than an impression of a superficial similarity. His artworks are recordings of the steps of a needle wandering around the canvas territory, accumulation of lines that could resemble the collection of frontiers and paths that moved hundred times represented simultaneously in one image. Layers superposing after layers from the bird eye view of the fantastic land. There is no map without memory,2 but these images are first and foremost traces and recordings of movements, so not a memory of a space but that of a time. If De Martino’s paintings are like maps, so they are a mediation instead of representation, more like a portal or a mirror than quantified data set. A travel and a story are the ones of the beholder though.

Music

Lines of colorful seams flow through the surface, cross each other, overlap and harmonize. Watching this reminds listening to free jazz or more generally a musical improvisation. The image has a presence through its composition, color, scale, and vibration of the whole.

Performative at source and irreverent towards symmetry and modernist grid, De Martino’s canvases pay homage to the Dionysian element of art. Small and medium size works are like impromptus, while recently created series of canvases exceeding 4sqm blow up the scale of the human body and have an overwhelming energy of a symphonic presence in space. 2024 marks a year in which the musical inspiration got explicit in the exhibition … sofferte onde serene… omaggio a Luigi Nono referring to the Italian musical avantgarde legend and, in particular, to his eponymous piece for piano and tape recorder from 1976 considered an important transformation phase in his compositions. … sofferte onde serene… mirrors a strive for an internal balance of living between suffering and serenity. In an interview, Nono once said about contemporary music: “it’s like listening to the wind. You hear something that passes but do not hear the beginning, do not hear the end, and perceive a continuity of absences, presences, and indefinable essences.” The quoted key words, matters of continuity and indefiniteness, constantly accompany De Martino's work.

The interest in music comes from the reflection on both the synaesthetic perception of De Martino’s artworks and the process of image making, that involves the machine imposing a rhythm and mediating the output as if it were played. The intensity of labor visible in the artworks give an idea of a process in which the artist searches for right balance, reminding a musician that tunes the instrument, looks for a good sequence, accord or theme that would create an interesting base for further composition growing quasi organically around that. Tunes and scale are characterized with metaphors of colors and just like in music notation silence is marked by pause, so the perforation in the canvas remaining after the undone seams has a similar corresponding quality of silence and emptiness.

Choreography for Sewing Machine

The instrument of the sewing machine and its operating artist through his hands and body is a dispositive for intimate seismography. Antinomy of freedom manifests itself in the conditions of limited field of action and limited means of the applied medium. The exciting challenge to work with the machine is the result of the struggle against it, producing an image that is a negotiation between a design and an “error” due to tugging needle of automated movement. A playful disruption of the machine is at the essence of the method similar to concrete poetry, for example Eugen Gromringer’s kein fehler im system [no error in the system] from 1969:

The resistance of the machine as a heavy mechanical device is an experience that has been effaced the daily life since the physical effort has been reduced by technology to a maximum degree, so that the typewriter is not only replaced by computer with a smooth electronic keyboard or touchscreen but moreover with a voice interface that completely erases the bodily effort. Art has always been sensitive towards technological progress, but as well hardly resisted an intoxication with false promises that new media were bringing. The hype of the digital art finally comes to an end like a fever, since the digital became just a part of the profane experience of life. The mechanical and the handmade, even though perceived increasingly as exceptional, help people to reconnect to the physical dimension and appreciate the marvel of the uniqueness. A historical disillusionment of the quantifiable and the purely conceptual in art marks a dead end of avantgarde formal experimentation with disintegration of color, gesture and materiality, and introduces a return of the romantic in the contemporary abstraction of which De Martino’s works are great example.

Skin

Reinventing the matter after digital media is a shared experience beyond the distinction between art and life. Tactile dimension of the material, the impression of the stitched and perforated canvas makes an impression of a skin not just a mere surface. Thick and uneven texture of the artwork is a visual record of the passed movements, applied force of the needle like a skin which holds unique marks of time and structure of its tissue. Let us not forget that the images are flatten by the photographic reproduction for the sake of print. Skin is a shield to protect the body, and textile retains symbolically the same meaning and an almost archaic feel. Laceration and perforation of the tissue have almost ritualistic symbolism and exceptionally rich subject for psychoanalysis and anthropology. It seems that Lucio Fontana on one hand and Günther Uecker on the other were able to transform this potential into prominent positions in contemporary art, providing an influential body of work that resonates in De Martino’s canvases.

The skin heals the cut with a scar. Isn’t the act of stitching the surface a desire to tend to a wound? To keep all the fragments together and to remember even though the memory might look like a palimpsest?

Konstanty Szydlowski