DANI MARTI
b. 1963
DANI MARTI was born 1963 Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works Sydney, Australia and Glasgow, Scotland. Marti works across video, installation and public art. His unorthodox woven and filmic works turns to wider notions of portraiture and sexuality in Modernism, Minimalism, and geometric abstraction.
Oscillating between hopefulness and failure, Dani Marti’s work is hinged to a representational paradox. For on the one hand it presupposes belief in the act of portrayal, and on the other hand it tacitly admits portraiture’s inevitable failure to accurately capture. His relation to his subject is consistently fixed: an obsessive, laborious, and often desire-driven attempt to represent something of his subject that is beyond appearances. Something of a deep-rooted lust between him and his subject, something of an essence, something, in other words, beyond surface. But it is surface—quite literally—that we as viewers are left with in Marti’s work, nothing objectively closer to ‘the real’ other than what one chooses to see and read into it. Marti’s work is thus an explicit reminder that viewer subjectivity is the only place where the portrait can truly be generated. His gestures toward it are merely our starting points.
“For Marti, both weaving and (video) taping, represent an act of bondage, a ritual which enables the artist to ‘possess’ the person that is portrayed. Aesthetics, pleasure, fantasy and security come into play reminding us of Foucault’s ideas about violence as an exercise of power that negatively affects freedom, and through which the dignity of the other is perceived under a new light. It’s a question of faith, of mutual consensus, but also and most importantly about portraiture as an impossible act.”
(Paco Barragan)
2016
2015
DARK HEART
2014
2011
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Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide, Australia |
Oscillating between hopefulness and failure, Dani Marti’s work is hinged to a representational paradox. For on the one hand it presupposes belief in the act of portrayal, and on the other hand it tacitly admits portraiture’s inevitable failure to accurately capture. But whether working in the medium of weaving or video, his relation to his subject is consistently fixed: an obsessive, laborious, and often desire-driven attempt to represent something of his subject that is beyond appearances. Something of a deep-rooted lust between him and his subject, something of an essence, something, in other words, beyond surface. But it is surface—quite literally—that we as viewers are left with in Marti’s work, whether in the abstraction of a large-scale weaving or in the flat documentary-style his videos take. There is no invitation to anything deeper than its screen, nothing objectively closer to ‘the real’ other than what one chooses to see and read into it.
Although Marti’s large-scale, woven works invite associations to Minimalism through their cool, reductive, and often literal approaches to material, his process adheres more closely to the precursor of that art historical moment; to more expressionistic ways of working. His relationship to the characters he portrays, whether intimate friend, stranger, or icon is an emotional one that becomes ritualized through both his methods of working and the claustrophobic proximity, which he develops to his subjects through his attempts to portray them. But due to the formal restraints he places upon himself as an artist, through the materials he chooses and the histories that are attached to them, emphasis becomes transferred from expression to the mediated nature of representation. To view his work is to be faced with information that has been rendered through its vital attachment to Marti himself, but it is presented to the viewer codified. Marti’s work is thus an explicit reminder that viewer subjectivity is the only place where the portrait can truly be generated. His gestures toward it are merely our starting points.
Lois Rowe
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