Nunzio De Martino / Linear opposite turns.

Observing the works of Nunzio De Martino you feel a total inner silence, as if the body contained and held the calm before a changing natural event appeared; walking closer to and farther away from the wall where the works are "suspended", there is a certain need to find a descriptive evocation, but it is the poetics that are declaimed by enunciating some words which lead you to that inner silence that these surfaces emanate.

Like an immersion in sounds, it is the decanted poetry that resonates in the auricles; during this listening, the vibration determines a spatial position that creates a synergetic movement in the beholder who decides to welcome this manifestation of synaesthetic sensations.

The colors in the works of Nunzio De Martino become metaphorical elaborations and lead to the discovery of new words that are not spoken immediately; there is the time in the pause between going down to the next line and starting another verse. The interval between one surface and another does not become a silence of forms but rather an absorption of matter on structure, as when we try to cover ourselves with the energy that these works emit.

When we see an artwork, what do we mainly do in front of a canvas, a sculpture or a performative action?

We are intrigued and we are "critics" of our seeing, and in both of these sensations that we let flow into the body, the brain decodes and transforms this information as a speech that can be lost as soon as it is pronounced. This is because we are indirectly aware that the artist has already detached himself from the surface of the work he has made.

The work of Nunzio De Martino is to create artworks that do not remain stationary; when they are observed, they have the power to move in an apparent fixity. You would like to think that they are stationary because they are anchored to the frame built by the artist, but they have that vitality of an infinite flight of birds that move in the space of the sky and leave, behind them, a wake created by the beating of wings that like small dots settle on the air’s atmosphere.

The artist does not ask for any translation into something. When the filaments are drawn-sewn-brushed-stretched-stopped-liquefied between canvas and fibre the work is conceived as a dimension not arranged in artistic categories; it can seek, in that inner silence, a pictorial tradition of the past repositioned in the 21st century.

Nunzio De Martino works with an abundance that transcends extemporaneity, it is not an accident that unravels on the canvas, it is not the line that chases the hand, but perhaps it is the artist’s hand that reaches what the hand designs; it is as if the painter, in changing color palettes and backgrounds, creates scenarios of a volume that is implosive and explosive, because of the bursts of energy that are calmed when the eye lingers and tries to follow that curvature that has created volume in the sculptural drawing.

The derivations to other artists who as tributaries enter the river that flows in Nunzio can be multiple; the artist collects with his eyes and other senses every daily aspect that manifests itself. This flow enters him even just along the path that leads him to his studio or while supporting point after line, choosing sensitive skin of different colours with texture thicknesses, placing cut out shapes that stretch along the wall. His work is sculpture in drawing.

When Pollock bent over, he became an animal in contact with a virgin canvas, everything appeared as an external sweating of what came out; it was not possible to repeat and stop, the artist’s movement was part of the work. He decided when the action should stop, in painful but also intoxicating and continuous motion. The feeling was futuristic, when the artwork had taken on its soul, then it was articulated and benefited from beauty.

Looking at the artworks is the thread, which stretches out like interstellar travels of small and dense trails of stars, they fall like bridges between the different galaxies, what is exhalted is the whole and the wonder of approaching and capturing the detail, where black and white fit together like cracks or expanded spaces; it is strength for the totality of the compositional space and Nunzio’s canvases are all pictorial in their diversity, a continuous relationship between detail and composition. There is a musical rigor like a geometry made by a brush without using hidden instrumentation. He rediscovers the geometricality of Renaissance artists, where the colors and volumes appear as in Piero della Francesca, who established in his time the definition of the mathematical painter.

De Martino could be an advocate of a non rigorous mathematics that takes root as the transformative possibility of a formulation of calculation where the progression is mysterious and if it has a rule, it must be found. The work of Nunzio De Martino follows the path of a search for interceptions into which each of us dives with joy or a bitter taste according to how it physically touches that animated surface.

“The artist,” said Jacques Maritain, “would suffer even more deeply if the public understood him; because they would wonder if his work did not lack that extra aspect, which, if it were understood, could not be communicated”.

From the volume "Chagall" by Walter Erben Silvana Editori.

Paola Ricci