As Donald Martiny tells us, his new abstraction, an ingenious fusion of painting and sculpture, was inspired by Tintoretto’s The Miracle of the Slave, 1548, a painting depicting the miraculous moment when St. Mark descended from the sky—heaven—to rescue a slave—by making him invulnerable—about to be martyred. The Venetian Tintoretto was called Il Furioso—he painted with furious energy and decisive swiftness. His brushwork, forceful and conspicuous—painterly and expressionistic, we would say—seemed to exist for its own pure sake. It was unprecedented, art historians tell us, for his gestures, dramatic and conspicuous, had a life of their own, independently of the life they gave to the figures, an emotional intensity independent of the emotions of the figures. Tintoretto’s paintings have been called proto-mannerist, but they are peculiarly baroque—far ahead of their times, for as the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin wrote, “baroque is movement imported into mass” (embodied movement, one might say)—which is also what the modernist critic Clement Greenberg called “painterly abstraction,” in a sense baroque painting stripped of representational purpose. Certainly the twisting figures of Baroque sculpture have something in common with the twisting, not to say convoluted, “figures” Martiny’s works cut. Painted sculptures?, sculpted paintings?—they are autonomous gestures, all the more grand because they are simultaneously three- and two-dimensional, giving them what the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead calls unusual “presentational immediacy.” There is certainly something “furious”—hyper-energetic, manic (no doubt under aesthetic control, aesthetically domesticated yet wildly driven)--about Martiny’s work, miraculously holding its own against—vigorously defying—the luminous white wall on which it miraculously holds its heavenly own, the way Tiepolo’s St. Mark does, a massive grand gesture disguised as a human figure, compressed into an oddly fluid, even amorphous shape.
To read Martiny’s work as an abstract distillation or secular translation of Tintoretto’s representational and religious painting—the shadowy red robe of the saint reductively transformed into a powerful grand gesture, the blue sky and luminous horizon seamlessly fused in less dramatic, less poignant gestures, resulting in a work more physically in-your-face than Tintoretto’s spiritual painting, comparatively static and self-contained compared to Martiny’s abstract work, with its animated, seemingly random gestures (it certainly more emotionally engaging and takes more creative risks)--is to sell its significance short. It argues for the continuity between representational and abstract art, more broadly, the inseparability of traditional and modernist art. Martiny’s gestures are simultaneously epic and lyrical, bridging the gap between—reconciling--American abstract expressionism and European abstraction lyrique, more particularly the aggressiveness of the New York School and the libidinousness of the School of Paris. It quintessentializes gesturalism. It is at once centrifugal and centripetal—a sum of dervishing gestures that hold together, attached to each other even as they seem to move apart—a balance of forceful forms ingeniously coordinated—“classically” harmonized, one might say, even as they are “romantically” at odds. The work is subjective signature painting objectified as sculpture—or is it object-like sculpture subjectified as expressionistic painting? Martiny’s painting/sculpture—sculptured painting, painterly sculpture, inviting us to re-imagine both—is a masterpiece of dialectical thinking.
Donald Kuspit