NUNZIO DE MARTINO

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.

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.

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.