MARTA SPAGNOLI
The sign is at the centre of Marta Spagnoli’s research. It is a sign that does not spring from predetermined hypotheses and is freed of any need to have a meaning. The sign is the primogenial entity, which first and foremost gives life to the painting on the surface for which it is intended. It is by no chance that, as in the large-scale work presented at Casa Testori, the sign assumes the filamentous aspect of a natural organism actively inhabiting the canvas, like continuously mutating writing. The sign, for Marta Spagnoli, effectively acquires pictorial value in the
moment in which it is free from intentionality and emotiveness, accepting its reduction to a trace, a clue, the simple result of an act that may sometimes simply coincide with the action of the brush. It is a condition where there are
neither hierarchies nor sequences that can restore a logic to these signs. Painting thus becomes an open field in which is enacted a re-immersion of forms, always poised between the archaic and the present, between the physical and the mythical dimensions. The sign, however empty of content it may be, never relapses into abstraction. The surface, as can be seen clearly in Untitled, thus becomes a place of great pictorial intensity, a field in which multiple and elementary energies gather. The canvas therefore becomes a space inhabited by these sequences, which are not simple translations of the real into writing, but pregnant particles from which to await new and ongoing processes of meaning.
