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Donald Martiny. Pathway - curated by Gianluca Ranzi. An exhibition of work by Donald Martiny in dialogue with the work of Jacopo Tintoretto.

Scala Contarini de Bovolo, San Marco, Venezia
ArteA Gallery, Milano

American artist Donald Martiny, born in New York state in 1953, presents at Palazzo Contarini del Bovolo some fifteen works in dialogue with space and in tune with the vibrant luminous atmosphere of the city of Venice.

Donald Martiny works by restoring autonomy and power to the materiality of colour. His vigorous, material brushstrokes are in fact isolated from the traditional support of the painting and seem to float in the air, freed from all representative and symbolic requirements.

The exhibition "Pathways", curated by Gianluca Ranzi, underlines the open transition that these works stage: from the artist's gesture to the environment in which they are inserted, from the plane of the wall to the volume that distinguishes them, from the time locked forever of the gesture that created them to the developing relationship with the observer and with light.

The speed of the gesture imprinted on the material seems to expand towards the surrounding space, opening up into passages and thresholds to be crossed, without any anxiety or tragic sense, so much so that the gesture often tends to retrace its steps, closing in on circular forms and in an ideal of continuity and infinity reminiscent of oriental calligraphic painting. The result is a series of works with a fluid and pulsating stroke that is at the same time almost elusive, involving as much as it is detached, with an abstract language that seeks formal definition and no longer, or not only, expression. His works are also captivating because of this ambivalence between action and contemplation and between participation and detachment, which takes the form of chromatic and material sabre-rattling that only distantly recalls Action Painting.

It is colour that speaks through the artist's gesture, so that the animated, textured surfaces of the brushstrokes bear witness only to themselves, living from the relationship between colour and light and relating to space. In this way the painting comes out of itself and becomes an object that is no longer sculpture, painting or performance, but extends to the environment, involving the viewer. Here, in fact, the observer interacts freely with the work, without the diaphragm of the canvas or the frame, immediately relating the size of the brushstroke to his body moving through space.

Pushing beyond form and opening himself up more and more to a new suggestion of centrifugal spatiality, Donald Martiny thus adds a new chapter to his journey, one might say in asceticism towards a spatiality of sinuous and expanding energy, which goes beyond the optical-perceptual effect to radiate as tension and liberation, as intense self-awareness and the search for a relationship with the world, towards the heart of poetry, the crucible of thought, the sense of life passing as continuity.

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