Exhibition: Christian Martinelli – Borders

Opening: 21.9.2019, 11:00
Exhibition: 24.9. – 26.10.2019

Christian Martinelli “Confini”, Exhibition at foto forum Bolzano/Bozen (Italy)

“Borders” belongs to the 00A cycle of works, a series of a ten-year long project in which the artist uses photography as a means, purpose, or witness to express themes important to him.

Christian Martinelli “Confini”, Exhibition at foto forum Bolzano/Bozen (Italy)

“The long strip of sand” that Pier Paolo Pasolini created in 1959, portraying Italy from Ventimiglia to Trieste, is a source of inspiration for the solitary six-month journey that Martinelli has undertaken. Over a five-year period, he traveled about 20,000 kilometers, returning the entire circumnavigation of Italy through 70 monotype images.

Christian Martinelli “Confini”, Exhibition at foto forum Bolzano/Bozen (Italy)

The images are obtained by using “the Cube”, an object which is both a camera, designed by the artist, as well as an installation work that captures and reflects the landscape at the same time.

Christian Martinelli “Confini”, Exhibition at foto forum Bolzano/Bozen (Italy)

“Borders” is born from the need that the artist has to deal with the theme of belonging to a territory; as the animal marks “its” space, delimiting its own boundaries, so does the human being, by drawing lines on geographical maps. The symbolic act of positioning “the Cube” within the landscape on the border becomes a way for the artist to trace his passage.

Christian Martinelli “Confini”, Exhibition at foto forum Bolzano/Bozen (Italy)

Martinelli does not conceive the border as an “end”, rather as a “beginning” and he represents it with images in which its lines blend together.

Christian Martinelli “Confini”, Exhibition at foto forum Bolzano/Bozen (Italy)

By using long exposure times, the horizon line dissolves creating a continuum between the features of the morphology of the real landscape.
Unlike Pasolini, Martinelli shifts the attention from an anthropological context to the natural one of the “borders”. It is therefore not a documentary representation of places, but a reflection, an intimate research on the poetics of the landscape. The artist returns images with infinite shades of color, more similar to a painting than to a photographic image. Like the abstract oceans of William Turner also the images realized by the artist are unique and unrepeatable works.