The walk
MARTA NATURALE
OPENING thursday SEPTEMBER 23RD 2021
UNTIL NOVEMBER 13TH 2021
The walk
MARIA CHIARA VALACChI
Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present The walk, first solo show of the artist Marta Naturale (Mirano, 1990). Two cycles of works never shown before, realized between 2013 and 2021, reveals a tireless interest in those corners of everyday life otherwise neglected by the human eye. Isolated housing fragments, urban natures and silent domestic interiors are translated into fifteen small paintings on wood with an hyperrealistic taste, created with techniques based on the Italian painting tradition. An installation that aims to encourage a deeper and transversal reflection on the theme of genius loci, on that unstable boundary between nature and artifice that produces small glimpses of negligibility, but, at the same time, of sublime normality.
“The walk” is the evocative name chosen by Marta Naturale to take the spectator on a journey of slow exploration that moves from the domestic space to the open space and vice versa; a clear reference to the
symbolic aspect of the threshold and how it always appears: a complex, albeit peaceful, agreement between the landscape, the human presence and the inanimate objects that inhabit it. Slowness is a noun that seems to immediately frame the practice of her proceeding, made even more concrete through the use of a pictorial attention aimed to define any ambient atmosphere and any detail she considers essential. A meticulous exercise of observation and selection that she enhances in each of her images, thanks to a skillful work of pictorial glazing, layers between which she embeds those extraordinary moments, which are usually forgotten.
Intentionally small in size, her paintings lead the viewer to be inevitably attracted to them, inviting him to intercept specificities that are only recognizable to an attentive eye; the dimensions perfectly frame the size of a face, prompting each of us to a solipsistic experience with each work on display. In this encounter, Marta Naturale seems to manage the dimension of sound as well. Her perspectives do not contemplate any noise, the auditory contamination is something that always remains in potential, imminent, stranded in the power of the detail that with its presence has the power to reconfigure a deaf whole. A phenomenology aimed at unhinging the certainties of what appears to be ordinary, taken for granted, to bring out of normality a sense of unexpected extra-ordinary. The aesthetic alphabet of her obsession is defined in the nature of the places - usually urban gardens managed by the hand of man or compressed into residential enclosures, a detailed and laborious description of foliage, branches, hedges, railings and isolated houses, often with an uninhabited appearance or in which, by artificial lights or details, the human presence is alluded to. It is also because of this undisturbed calm that any barrier, whether plant or architectural, is open to easy conquest, and the artist's "walk" from the outside moves nimbly towards the inhabited interior. With a voyeuristic spirit, Marta Naturale takes us to discover the corners of another nature, the one kept within the physical walls of a house, where memories, joys and anxieties are consumed in the fixity - once again silent - of a furnished space or in the display of various objects, of which we will never know their stories and the reason for their importance.
Quoting Marc Augé, the artist represents at the same time a "concrete and symbolic construction of space", creating anthropological places full of information that she fragments into three experiential moments: the external, the internal and the one hovering in the indeterminacy of the threshold; through her calm and at the same time disturbing atmospheres, Marta Naturale simply invites us to dwell on the essence of things exactly as they appear to us.
A dialogue on painting with Marta Naturale
Maria Chiara Valacchi:
When and why did you choose painting as your expressive language?
Marta Naturale:
For me, painting is an immediate and spontaneous medium with which to relate, and I cannot specify a precise moment when I have chosen it as my medium of expression. The act of painting has always something visceral and intuitive in it, but at the same time it is an act mediated by thought and it requires a capacity for abstraction from reality, even in its most mimetic manifestations. I think this combination is what makes painting, for me and for many, a natural choice.
M. C. V. :
Among many pictorial alphabets, you have chosen hyperrealism. Do you think it is an essential formula in your work?
M. N. :
Personally, I would not speak of hyperrealism; my images depart from reality, they simplify, geometrize, even invent. But without ever deviating too much from the realistic vision. This certainly represents a key component in my painting. There is nothing more alienating, surprising, terrible, absurd than reality; and the image that adheres to it can only amplify these aspects.
M. C. V. :
How do you deal with the horror vacui of the empty canvas and when do you consider a work as finished?
M. N. :
When I start a new painting I already have a general idea of what I want to represent. Through various stratifications, often with rethinkings and adjustments, I tend to work on every inch of the surface in a pedantic manner, focusing on the deposit of matter on the surface, the emergence of details, the light. The work is finished when a specific atmospheric tension between the parts is reached, a state that I would call suspension or freezing of the image.
PRESS REVIEW