Testo di Cecilia Canziani | Testo di Alessandro Sarra
Text by Cecilia Canziani | Text by Alessandro Sarra

Marta Mancini’s second solo show at Matèria takes the name of Buds, a somber-sounding term that in its multiplicity of meanings can be understood as blossom or sprout.

Started during lockdown and developed over a period of two years, Mancini’s new body of work has seen in its final months of elaboration, the surfacing of shapes and colors that sharply embody the character of landscape painting.

It’s useful to travel back in time to find within the exhibition, signs of disruption as well as those of continuity with the artist’s previous cycles: Marta Mancini’s work may in fact appear to proceed through a series of ruptures, fuelled by the incessant production of new cycles, which are, however, always created in a dialectical relationship with her previous work, almost as a continuation of her dialogue with the medium of painting.

In fact, while the works presented in her previous solo exhibition (La molla, Matèria, 2018) were characterised by large proportions, verticality, and the cancellation of the pictorial surfaces in an effort to isolate their specific proportions that were playing with one another; in this case, instead, we are presented with a horizontal layout, small dimensions and constructive pictorial gestures; the image is formed through the juxtaposition of color backdrops composed of minute - almost childlike -  brushstrokes, buds.

However, the distance is only apparent, because in the genealogy of this new body of work one can trace the thread to its previous cycle: the contour line - that in the first paintings of the series still separates the different color sections, almost reminiscent of the ballpoint pen drawings that have accompanied the development of the last Molle - gradually disappears, whilst the color becomes capable of creating new shapes that when accosted to one other, reveal themselves as interiors, then as landscapes with figures, houses and huts, trees that at the same may just be blotches, abstract signs. Moreover, the size of the works references an even older series, Abita (2012), in which the color palette, mostly composed of green and purple shades, was already embedded with small traits that would become structural in Buds, and thus functional to the proposition of an exercise; almost as if with these paintings, the artist tests the imaginary of Italian postwar painting and selected experiences from the European avant-garde - all through the use of an apparently simple sign.

The paintings exhibited are placed in dialogue with two unpublished drawings from 2013, which similarly have brief signs running over the entire surface of the paper and that seem to draft the shapes of possible figures, activating the entire surface of the sheet.

The exhibition is accompanied by a text by Alessandro Sarra, painter, who has had a close relationship with the artist since her debut.

- Cecilia Canziani