Achenbach Hagemeier

born 1983 in Soltau, Germany, lives and works between Val di Zoldo and Duesseldorf

Martini breaks down the gestural continuity of the creative act in the painting, experimenting different ways, times and materials in his multi-phaseworks. His paintings are like stratified visual fields, deeply marked by the perseverant need to deny a planned result, strongly decked to find the unexpected potential of complex, precarious and unique material conditions. His research celebrates many substantial features of painting but makes symbolic and narrative attention become redundant.

"Tiziano Martini’s work, stemming from aniconism, it is brought to life by opposing desire, which was one of the most prolific tendencies of the twentieth century. His artistic practice aims to develop a sedimentation process that allows colours to permeate the canvas in all their realistic hues. What he does in his studio is actually a long, organic process due to the slow and repetitive procedure, but also industrial because of the technique and typology of the materials used. Martini applies acrylic paint to plastic slides against which surface and stencils are pressed. Afterward, when everything is fixed in place and dry, the artist rips the colour away with a vigorous motion, leaving larger and smaller swaths of the material behind. Not unlike some rocks, which were formed layer for layer over the geological eras by deposits of billions of mineral molecules, Martini amasses dozens of layers, until the canvas is visually filled, until the surface reaches a kind of balance and no longer needs attention. It’s an ongoing practice, the painted foils are used several times for new paintings and they always leave their marks from old paintings on the new ones. Decisions have historical weight, they don’t only stand for one painting, they may physically be seen in other paintings years later. In his practice, the search for equilibrium is a central theme, in which the physical—gestural—psychological aspects (the individual need for the artist to personally emboss and tear away the chromatic prints) and the visual order interact, and in fact are encouraged to do so by the tendency of the artist’s medium to saturate with acrylic treatment and acrylic colours."
Daniele Capra, Tiziano Martini: Die Tücken der neuen Freiheit (Le insidie della nuova libertà), Achenbach Hagemeier Düsseldorf, 2017