The market has always been a source of suggestions from which Martina Gagliardi draws multiple impulses for her work. Plastic and wooden crates, raw materials and their deterioration process are the cornerstones of the development of her first research ‘Threads and Waves’, which she pursued from 2021-2023. From here, he developed an individual artistic language, which he continues to develop to this day through new experiments and evolutionary forms.
“In the markets, passing through these boxes that are unusable because they have been dismembered, I have spotted in their parts the matrices: fundamental resources for my work. These scraps ask to be looked at one last time before being heaped up and discarded, they have a soul defeated by history, and waiting for someone to notice them they silently express their residual essence. I am saving what can be saved. I tear fragments of reality from a world in flux, basting a new narrative that advances the thread of hope.”
The simplicity of the sign gives way to a deeper, opaque and unstable experience that lurks beneath the surface of everyday life. The crate thus becomes a powerful medium through which Martina Gagliardi explores very personal and intimate concepts that give shape to emotional reflections linked to the theme of memory, fragility, vulnerability and hope.
The three installations play the role of witnesses, becoming a permanent version of what is usually a fleeting phenomenon. The young artist’s artworks become tales, fragments of a story, poetic syntheses that, in their materiality, occupy a space in which one can immerse oneself and remain involved.
The first room sees an installation dedicated to tnt, the artist’s iconic material, which brings into dialogue the soul of a material that no longer exists and its black weave, light, transparency and the movement of the viewer; the second room is dedicated to artworks made on jute in which coloured plots of crates and wooden planks tend to become an abstract narrative. Their unprecedented disposition on aerial and cylindrical bases evokes an infinite circular reading.
Thus Martina, through her language made up of signs that seem like coded messages, negative paintings and frottage that indelibly imprint the soul of now dismembered objects, reminds us that we are only here for a moment but, at the same time, we are witnesses to our permanence and the continuity of life.
