The thread found / from Van Gogh to De Martino-KP3.1.1.

It can happen that images of works of art disappear, photographs that have documented the work of artists are found later; works created that are lost or destroyed, found by chance and without knowing what story they hide.

Knowledge of the history of art also starts from these events and from the search and recovery of lost things, from their understanding and become fundamental for a careful reading of the works contained in museums. It is a rediscovered thread that links the narration, the history and the recognition of a work or a cycle of work by the artist.

A notebook of drawings attributed to Vincent van Gogh and found in modern times, reopens a heated dialogue about his drawings and his work. It lays new foundations for studies and understanding the material of the work, in this case they studied the type of paper and the ink used, the whole thing can seem like a treasure hunt in the artistic field.

Talking about contemporary art is inseparable from the past, contemporary artists observe and absorb what has been created and what they discover becomes an active substrate like a fabric on which aesthetic creation is transcribed.

The drawing is a strong starting point and in this circularity between past and present the insertion of the medium of thread, used in different ways, is configured.

The thread is as strong as the graphite mark on the drawing paper, because it “sacrifices”, in an illusory way, its structure to create a pictorial drawing. Vincent van Gogh ’s drawing is the trace, it is the speleology in the humoral depths and the hand tries to reach in drawing what it sees.

Vincent 's ink slid onto the paper with pens or dripped from straws; the thread clings to the paper or fabric, flips the front and back, piercing without inflicting any pain, but creates subtle and iridescent colors. Thread and pencil are both elements that "mark" and "trace", deconstructing the work and understanding the intrinsic aesthetic material of it.

The artist determines the work or rather decides what to mentally deconstruct and reconstructs in the work. Vincent van Gogh said: “It is working through an invisible iron wall that seems to separate what one feels from what one is able to do. It is necessary to weaken this wall, eroding it little by little with constancy and patience”.

This term “ weaken ” that Vincent uses to scratch a matter, brings to mind another very similar one, which is to “ dig ” a compact matter such as earth.

Maria Lai said it, speaking about the work of artists; it is to go down into an imaginary cave and stay down there, in a deep mine and dig alone. She did not know what to look for, but she was sure she had to dig. A student of Arturo Martini, she learned the teaching of working with unusual materials, to find new frontiers in sculpture.

An apparently unusual material is then the thread, relegated to the compartment for the creation of craft or design objects, is for the artist a new constructive determination.

The formal features of the works become movable, floating and the hands modify the raw material, the artist becomes one with the work.

It is interesting to mention the performance work “ Legarsi alla montagna ” by Lai , unlike the rest of her artistic production which is a continuation of other artists of the time who experimented with thread.

Maria Lai decided to tie all the inhabitants of the village, all the doors, streets and houses with about 27 km of light blue fabric ribbons. It is called “ Legarsi alla montagna ”; the conceptual aspect of the work is interesting and it is the first relational art action with the world.

The relationship with the mountain, people and place of life is so formally visible and reinforced by the metaphorical connotation that the fabric, transformed into thread, rope really unites landscape and life to people and it would not have been possible with another medium.

The medium becomes an aesthetic message when it strengthens both its formal construction and its intrinsic connotation, and this is because the thread has the intrinsic power to “bind” elements and concepts.

Sewing and weaving are acts at the basis of a life of social relations, they are the metaphorical transposition of what is thought on the human body. The term “ Textum ” is fabric, cloth, interweaving, but it is also the plot of a discourse, concatenation and also deception. Weaving one’s own canvas means the acceptance of living oneself towards others.

Nunzio De Martino 's works have a connotation of textures that develop over time, revealing the different layers that are not separate from each other; the plot is compact with threads, where the perforation is invisible and the weight of the thread is intertwined with the plot, it is a metaphorical action of the bond and the unveiling, in De Martino the intrinsic connotation of the thread is painting because it leaves a pictorial sign. The work manifests itself both by looking at it in detail and by moving away on a long field. It seems like you are in front of two different works because the distance takes on the value of coming out of it and when you get closer, your hand penetrates the material of the fabric. KP3.1.1. is the work of Nunzio De Martino that operates the fragmentation that recomposes itself, the artist speaks of Deconstruction / Recomposition. The surface is large (200 x 270 cm) the body in its entirety can enter the canvas and go beyond it through the infinitely small and invisible perforations.

We know that for some pre-Socratics the soul corresponds to the experience of an organism whose matter is so ethereal that its explanation cannot be compared to air. Breath is the last thing that leaves the body.

For the Greeks, there was clearly a close relationship between air, the void and the infinite, either because the soul was considered a particle so ethereal that it evaporates in death, or simply because the air is represented up to the horizon as far as the eye can see. These aspects are better understood if one thinks of placing art as at the edges and that its statements, because they lean towards eccentricity, provide clues to what is hidden.

Western culture considers the world as a set of objects, while Chinese thought considers the world as the emanation of a vital breath, of an energy (qi) that develops on different planes of condensation, more or less visible: the rock is concentrated (qi), the cloud is a rarefied (qi).

The reconstructive ethics in the works of Nunzio De Martino is close to what the philosophy of Jean-Marc-Ferry identifies that in the deconstructive gesture there are already some recomposing and reconstructive elements, which contemporary philosophy has the task of valorizing. Reconstructing reason is to not surrender to the widespread socio-political cynicism; giving back value to reconstruction as a category of the sensitivity of rational thought, recognizing the vulnerability of people in discussions.

Nunzio De Martino 's work is matter, but also energy and vital breath that is present with the unexpected. The hand is overridden in the action of deconstructing and reformulating. The fabric is dead matter at the beginning, but when it is chosen by the artist, it takes on a life impressed by that duality between inside and outside that connects with the social environment and that is silenced and transformed by De Martino to be living matter reconstructed with polyphonic sounds.

The history of art is a demagogy and if poorly formulated and not deepened, it must be exposed with formal relevance and bordering on a " scientific " study. Nunzio De Martino elaborates a work knowing the material perfectly and reports a painting of a very balanced chromatic design that seeks deviations without defining the previous boundaries. A formal concomitance appears with the works of Ghada Amer , who has replaced the brush with the needle. Although representing the feminine corporality of the woman, she declares that she wants to make paintings with thread, not creating a painting competition, but a challenge on the material.

De Martino creates in that chromatic thread with the thickening of the pictorial matter, reaching the limit of the balance between the surface and the painting.

Ghada Amer in the works Red and White Lovers of 2002 with acrylic, embroidery and gel on canvas has created those anthropomorphic and abstract waterfalls and leaves the backdrop that becomes not only canvas but a transparent surface. Nunzio De Martino occludes transparency with the chromatic choice of the backdrop of KP3.1.1. It is a night of opaque earth, the environmental depth is created by waterfalls of colors to overturn the wall and make it passable despite being "dark". In this work he looks out making the plot breathe unlike the repeated and encrypted message in the works of Boetti " Order and Disorder " 1979 and " The Seen " of 1972-73. Boetti's monochromaticity that saturates the surface like an illegible and suffocating code that gives peace only in the imperceptible change of some colors.

De Martino chooses to divide the colors while assembling them and with a mysterious balance, without being able to understand where the beginning is and when he stopped working. Everything is excited in a movement of knowledge and ability to hold the needle like a brush bordering on the detail of a Renaissance painting.

Fiber Art has followed a steep path before establishing itself as an autonomous art form.

At the edge of craftsmanship in the 80s, where the handmade is not only a pictorial question, the concept of craftsmanship is cleared, it takes on a priority that looks at the conceptual under another guise. The differentiation between major and minor art, where handmade craftsmanship was placed, is eliminated. The separations become thinner after the 80s, there having been museum and Biennial work since the 60s. With the inauguration of the Biennale de la Tapisserie in Lausanne (1962) and then throughout the 70s with important exhibitions such as “Deliberate Entanglements” (1971) the public recognition of different languages occurs and especially in textile art earning the name Fiber Art.

Nunzio De Martino 's work is spinning the thought, unrolling what will never be said, but is in the work. The thread is also repairing what has happened, the life that suffers traumas. The weaving reconstructs what may have broken and torn in this regard the spider of JJ Rousseau comes to mind, which tries to repair because it is able to self-produce its web that expands and is capable of mending the detachments until it even loses its strength.

What the thread accomplishes in these artists is not the transience of the colour of the yarn, which appears sustained in Ghada Amer and which underlies the configuration of women's bodies superimposed like in an all-over dripping by Pollock .

In Nunzio De Martino the work is intensified in the chromatic material, like an overlapping of layers upon layers, of threads of different colors, where what is important is not so much the technique, but the concept of art that emerges from it.