PRESS RELEASE: Time Space Existence (A Retrospective) at Madison Gallery

In honor of Donald Martiny’s inclusion in the PERSONAL STRUCTURES Exhibition at the 59th Venice Biennale, Madison Gallery announces TIME SPACE EXISTENCE a retrospective of the artist’s important works dating from 2013 to the present. Many of these works were included in Donald Martiny’s first major solo exhibition, Freeing the Gesture at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, and are available for private acquisition for the first time.

“In the 1950s, artists like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline elevated the gesture to the position of the protagonist in abstract expressionism. In the 21st century, Donald Martiny advances that idea considerably further by freeing the gesture of gestural abstraction from the substrate which, heretofore, provided the context that brought gesture to life. Working with polymers and dispersed pigments, Mr. Martiny has developed a methodology that enables him to isolate his sumptuous, almost sculptural, brushstrokes and lift them off the page, so to speak. The nature of his material is such that Mr. Martiny can work on a much larger scale than if he were dependent on a canvas surface; indeed, each singular brushstroke might range from two- to as much as six feet in length. Installed, these compelling monochromatic gestures immediately breathe a new kind of life into the gallery space.

Historically, Mr. Martiny’s work to date fits right into the continuum of monochromatic painting, a contemporary reductive movement that has advanced the concerns and broadened the interests of the classic Minimalists of the 1960s and of the much earlier Suprematists, who openly sought the ‘death of painting” with their monochromatic efforts. Mr. Martiny belongs to a family of painters, including such luminaries as Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko, Ad Reinhardt, Barnett Newman, Frank Stella, and Olivier Mossett. Amazingly, these distinguished artists brought something noticeably different to this admittedly singular and restrictive approach to painting. Before Mr. Martiny, though, each of these other great painters relied on manipulating the relationship between canvas and pigment to achieve subtle, nuanced differences in each painting. Mr. Martiny has greatly expanded the painterly agenda by taking the brushstroke completely off the canvas entirely. I applaud his commitment to furthering the monochromatic agenda and his ability to make fresh, new work that acknowledges, rather than negates, decades of previous good work. Rather than hastening the death of painting as Rodchenko forecast, monochromatic painting has already enjoyed a long lifeline and, in the hands of Donald Martiny, is alive and well.”

Charles Shepard III, Director, Ft Wayne Museum of Art.

For more information visit www.madisongalleries.com.

PRESS RELEASE: Donald Martiny's "Moment" to be exhibited in Venice during the 59th Venice Biennale

Madison Gallery will be exhibiting Donald Martiny’s seminal work, Moment as part of the Personal Structures Exhibition at Palazzo Bembo, April 23 through November 27, 2022, in conjunction with the 59th Venice Biennale.

Art and spirituality have always been intimately connected, not only in the way they address the nature of our existence, but also because of their ability to register deep within us. Together they viscerally connect us to an inner feeling, spirit, or vital essence. This work by Donald Martiny strives for what Kandinsky described as the “vibration of the human soul.” 

The painting titled Moment is by far the most ambitious work Martiny has made to date. The painting is made of multiple elements, its creation demanding over one hundred liters of paint to produce. Working on the floor, the artist moves physically inside, around, and through the varied components of his compositions within the paint, pushing the viscus color across surfaces with his hands, arms, and body. 

The work is figurative in the sense that dynamic gestures relate to the human form in landscape. Shaped paintings have typically been made through an additive process, by applying paint to predetermined shapes. Martiny’s work challenges that notion. His gestures and completed compositions gain their power through a hybrid subtractive process that determines the final profile of the work. 

From a formal perspective, his process forces us to question established definitions which define our fundamental understanding of painting. The art of Donald Martiny exists somewhere between painting and sculpture. We are confronted with a singular brushstroke, huge, a seemingly spontaneous, lavish eruption of color and texture on the wall.

This exhibition was made possible by curator Lorna York and Madison Gallery.

Donald Martiny and Tintoretto: Baroque Abstraction

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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

Solo Exhibition: Donald Martiny | Divine Material, Curated by Alain Chivilò

The strength of an artist is to create with originality starting from cultural education in the art history. Donald Martiny, as incipit, was inspired by his colleague Barnett Newman, refining a greater analytical propensity, apt to search all that is transcendental.

In the concept aimed at chasing the beyond, in what we know and see, bases are determined to shape creativity in unexplored compositions.

If for Newman to conceive implies managing chaos within image-essence, art consequently must tend to the discovery of "new forms and symbols having the living quality of creation".

Donald Martiny born in the County of New York State in an area of artistic fervor starting from Abstract Expressionism, interprets, although belonging to successive generations, an inner revolution through incisive gestures.

Living in the Big Apple air, a city that was able to unite history and experimentation in a cultural and artistic context, allowed Martiny to design by combining form and colors. From these pictorial elements there is a historiography within a contemporary vitality.

Consequently, for the artist, the creation takes place in an action along a compositional interpretation governed by immediacy and hidden programming, as for example Gutai Group and Action Painting.

Donald Martiny does not linger on the result obtained in the instant and in the will, but investigates how space and forms can play with each other in illusory relationships. To this end, in his works, multiple plans are determined among light, environment and movement thanks to a skillful combination of pictorial overlaps.

“The present painter is concerned not with his own feelings or with the mystery of his own personality, but with the penetration into the world-mystery. His imagination is therefore attempting to dig into metaphysical secrets.” - Barnett Newman

Every artistic composition comes from a previous project that, from the color theory, generates nuances for intelligent tonal mixtures connoting a Martiny style.

The artistic act starts from a reasoning that, in the different intensities, is realized through a calibrated use of brushes, hands and other tool useful to cause visually gentle scratches. Physical movement is a creative act for a sinuous and enveloping shape in an effective rhythm always in harmony with the generating force. Therefore, the gesture is in the colors while the external light creates, naturally or artificially, energies that put the work in connection with the hosting space.

Where the not form seem to contradict itself, denying it, Donald Martiny allows it to be reborn, generating sensory, dynamic and interactive relationships, obtaining positive emotions. Tactile values are naturally formed between the volumes and the plastic effects towards the observer, for relationships of pure emotion.

The different nuances thus directly influence the soul as indicated by Wassily Kandinsky, but also allow them to be stretched in their static movement, for a vibration of clear musical freedom. Martiny's works always live within a materiality ruled by gradations rich in poetry for simply dreamlike architectural contexts.

In his self-discovery action, reference to Jackson Pollock, through an apparent non-violent sign shapes asymmetrical commas, which in their visual interaction, multi-dimensional and physical, echo lyrical abstractions of expressive painting always linked to the surrounding environment. Martiny conceives pictorial creations that, in an apparent simplicity, deepen intellectually the human essence.

Paraphrasing a thought of the writer George Bernard Shaw, it is evident that the pictorial-sculptural action of Martiny, in his personal elaboration, starts from afar because he believes "in Michelangelo, Velásquez and Rembrandt, in the painter of drawing, in the mystery of color": in that sometimes symbiotic, sometimes mutualistic relationship that links elements of art history to contemporary forms and symbols.

Donald Martiny reveals metaphysical enigmas, recalling how originality combined with interpretation generate new complexities, but above all allow a multidimensional interaction between time, tactile sensation, visual perception, spatiality, colors, matter and light.

Donald Martiny, Divine Material
Solo Exhibition Curated by Alain Chivilò

Casa Del Mantegna, Mantova, Italy
July 20 - August 25, 2019