Elisabetta Martinez

ANOTHER ROME IN THE ROOM

A journey into the Eternal City, Rome, its monuments and goddesses, with the eyes of the dream and the magic of the awakening.

Close your eyes. Imagine Rome. All the photos you have been seeing, the movies, your memories. Ok, that's ok. But if you are Elisabetta Martinez and you do the same what you get is something different. It's Another Rome in the room. Visions become dreams. Monuments become whispers. Goddesses become embraces. Entering this project is like diving into another dimension, where Rome stands in front of you transfigured, breathing deeply and calmly, chewing your expectations and representations.

I met Elisabetta's artworks being hit by her 'big faces', their bulky gaze was quickly turning into a flame of a memory: inhaling that holy smoke I got thrown in another Rome. Colours were speaking softly but powerfully, taking shapes around my imagination and I started my journey in this amazing 'new' city. The balance between the softness of these visions and the solidity of the importance of Rome made me fall in love with these artworks. And I immediately wanted to share these emotions with all the people that, in the pandemic global constrains framework, are not able to reach physically the Eternal City. In this way anyone can walk again inside Rome and have another Rome in the room.

MY ROME, ELISABETTA SPEAKING

Rome, too big for me, limitless in its historical and narrative complexity; it is only like this, that is reduced to small bits and simple geometries, that it can be recognised and recounted through my interpretation. Until the 16th Century, little could be seen of the river Tiber in the vedute (Italian for views) or cityscape figurative print, if not in city plans and topographies, but then with the vedutisti (the painters of vedute) and the Renaissance perspective, it turned out to be the subject of many vedute, even though it was not until the 17th Century that it fully became part of “vedutism"; that particular painting genre depicting cityscapes. The view widened then in perspective images of the river, of bridges and factories; great and important buildings along with familiar scenes and ruins, traces of the past about to tumble and be forever lost, relics etched and frozen on the canvas.

The Tiber flew and participated in the stretching of time and space, in the motion of water and people, in religious and pagan festivals, in propitiatory rituals and processions on the water, and in fireworks; while Hadrian's Mole (known as Castel Sant'Angelo) in its stillness, like a motionless guardian, watched those fleeting reflections on the river, so often unveiling how precarious everything was; and everything, once the show was over, would be erased and return to darkness… both precariousness and contemporaneity. Nonetheless, the real landscape, the bridges; the riverbanks and the trees are all still there… Bridges, Domes, Walls and Structures, powerful and mighty forms, large monoliths-signs of the city built with cyclopean boulders and fat mortars. These parts of the urban connective tissue stand for what bonds, supports and glues as well as divides, separates and isolates; a “double" perception of the same reality.

This collection of works stems from this endless game of uniting and then separating, in a fluctuating and visionary journey, an oneiric perception, always hovering between mystery and reality. The noisy and fast city comes to a halt, frozen in its primary ancient elements: arches and straight lines, domes and bridges, walls and river, all ancestral symbols of our imaginary.

BIO

Born in Rome. I have dedicated my life to art since 1978, when my artistic education started in the art studio of my father, Maestro Luigi Martinez. Back in those years, while attending painting, sculpture and etchings classes, I studied for my scientific high school diploma first, and later in 1989, graduated in Architecture at the University “La Sapienza" in Rome. It was then that I started my career as an architect in my own studio in Rome, and, almost simultaneously, became a volunteer assistant at the Faculty of Architecture.

The passion for painting accompanied me all through those years, starting with the first drawings in pencil or ink, where I began experimenting and focusing on the theme of the face… They were essential and minimal representations, made of a few signs and shades, depicting sequences of overlapping and interlocking faces in a continuum of curved lines. Oil paint and its fascination won me over only later on and lead me to new pictorial experimentations, in the context of urban landscapes and figurative painting. My current works are the direct result of those early experiences. They speak of floating female figures, folded in onto themselves between dream and reality; faces, thoughtful and rapt in sleep; broken down and reassembled by geometric elements and “cuts" that interrupt the figurative continuity as to give a new interpretation of the form. 

“Geometries and Forms" are the themes of my studies and research and follow two expressive paths which I pursue simultaneously. On one hand, the study of the female human body folded in onto itself, absorbed in an inner space of meditation and sweet relaxation, interrupted in its formal continuity by overlapping ribbons and geometrical rhythms, never comprised in the reduced space of the canvas. The drawing remains a hint, unfinished, abstract, leaving large parts of the canvas incomplete and borderless. On the other hand, I focus on works based on archetypal forms, mysterious primitive and symbolic figures appear on informal backgrounds… Traces, footprints of timeless deities, defined by large and rich color drafts. Figures inspired by the giants of Nemrut Dagi in Turkey, the temples of Bayon in Cambodia, the cyclopic sculptures of Egyptian art and the Great Buddhas.

This process takes place through an endless depiction which allows the gaze and the mind the chance of reading an image, outlined by open and dynamic structures, where we can grasp something unseen; something we have inside and that can only be decoded by our inner gaze. In my latest works I am experimenting with the construction of the urban landscape of Rome, interpreted and summarized in its primary compositional signs and elements; sectioning and reassembling it starting from its founding elements; arches, domes, wall segments, blocks and marble slabs, always searching for a concise and summarising depiction of the forms. The use of pure oil paint, applied in subsequent sequences and overlays, creates nuances, textures and transparencies…the charcoal often remains as a trace of what was the initial sketch or as a glaze that messes the color…small gold or silver leaf applications widen the reading planes, and the spatula is the main tool of the creative gesture.