Interview with the artist Martina Antonioni | Artribune

With her works Martina Antonioni (Milan, 1986) gives shape to her investigation into poetic intimacy, preferring above all the possibilities offered by painting. Trained at NABA, the New Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, she has participated in various workshops: with Tim Rollins (2011), with Grupo Etcetera (2011), with Nomedas and Gediminas Urbonas (2010). Among the group exhibitions in which she has participated are: Wow!Federico Rui Contemporary Art (Milan, 2021); States of Mindcurated by Petra Cason, Palazzo Valmarana Braga (Vicenza, 2019); Michelangelo Reload, curated by Alessandro Romanini, CAV – Centro Arti Visive, (Pietrasanta, 2019). His last solo exhibition was held in 2024 at the Federico Rui Arte Contemporanea gallery in Milan. Moving from one of the main themes underlying his poetics, the indefinite imperfection that characterizes life, this dialogue brings to light other aspects that characterize it: the interest in the possibilities of painting, the role of rules, the attention to space, the influence of poetry.

Interview with Martina Antonioni

Your way of making art, which was already seen in your first works based on the use of photography and stands out even more in your paintings, does not allow any space for ornamentation.
I think it’s worth the chance to work while fully enjoying what happens, without neglecting that things can change without you expecting it, as happens naturally in everyday life. Painting is not just a matter of achieving a form, but rather finding the most satisfying way to do so.

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By following this inclination you get your canvases filled with “signs that fall apart”.
There is a teaching I received when I started studying painting that influenced me a lot: to forget everything I knew. And this also applies to any claims from the point of view of materials and means for making art. In some way, my works show imperfections, errors, transfigurations. In fact, I don’t think we can underestimate everything that needs to be faced to be able to do them. The fact that elements and subjects or even details regarding what is done can leak from a work is in a certain sense a conquest. Those signs fall apart for multiple reasons, because of the materials and colors I use. Let’s take white: I know how to use it satisfactorily because I have been using it for a very long time and it is a color that allows me to work pictorially almost as if I were a sculptor. Or, let’s consider the use of cartoons: it allows me to free painting, to obtain results that I could otherwise perhaps only imagine.

You seem to react to every obstacle or constraint by taking action to overcome it as soon as you encounter it.
Somehow, that’s how it goes. I react to multiple constraints, which are first and foremost physical, through the very possibility of working in an even deeper way on the expansion of forms. For me it’s also about dealing with the influence of multiple rules. For example, if I don’t have space around me, I look for it on the canvas.

What role do rules have in your work?
Some of them I frequent, even if on balance I could tell you that I almost don’t notice. I know they are there, because then I see traces of them. I no longer have others. Over time I realized that I had modified and transformed them. Having rules helps you be free. At least, that’s how it goes for me. Giving up something to go somewhere else is deeply challenging.

Perhaps, it is because of this inclination towards freedom that your activity is also a permanent investigation into space. I am thinking in particular of the sculptures in the shape of breasts that are scattered everywhere. How did their production begin?
Theirs is first of all the story of a small lemon that I had left at home during a period of withdrawal due to a health problem. I scrutinized him, almost entranced, in front of his yellow skin. The more I looked, the more I realized that that yellow, wrinkled sphere wasn’t just a fruit. I noticed that it looked a lot like a breast. From that moment I started working on it, trying to find the most satisfactory way to give shape to this idea of ​​mine. Take the lemons and dry them, work on their shapes using plaster. But it wasn’t just a sculptural work.

Why?
In order to move forward with production (which has now been going on for almost three years), have many lemons and shape a breast from each one, I involved more people. I asked them to keep them aside and wait patiently for them to dry, to save them and then have them for me. It is a work that is the fruit of one female collaboration. A choral work, which starts from waste, which has been transformed into an evolving constellation of breasts, which, like an alien form, colonizes space and becomes a relationship. It is a work of relationship and patience. It is an activity carried out in several phases, through which I also developed my own idea around the possibilities of an installation based on sculpture.

What idea is this?
I am interested in that misunderstanding that determines the very presence of all those lemons/breasts arranged on a large surface: they almost seem like finds of marine life, natural materials belonging to the aquatic depths… Then, let me say, there is also a whole mystery that it is specific to the fruit and which recurs with each sculpture: each half of the lemon dries in its own way and takes on its own shape, also becoming very different from the other half. This is also decisive for that sharing between surfaces, that of the lemon peel and that of the skin, which I then try to establish.

Another aspect also stands out: the loss of a center. Although, the impression I have is that it is only a temporary outcome, because then you always work on centralization.
Somehow it is necessary not to be overwhelmed. As if I were immersed. Something similar happens when you are in water and swimming: you kick your feet to avoid ending up under water. A bit like if you were able to react to a possible risk of drowning.

Your way of expressing yourself is often based on the use of a few colors. I’m thinking, for example, of your work I don’t suffer for love: we would like to say there is a light blue, white and pink. But then we have to review everything in relation to the red of the flower and a green that is almost impossible to grasp. Yet, it is there.
It’s about getting very close – I don’t know if it will go that way, but at least I’ll try – to the possibility of stopping something from disintegrating. The individual elements you describe are somewhat the chromatic and symbolic counterpart of my attempts to fix explosions. Almost as if color could allow me to take snapshots on canvas of motions and detonations.

The influence of poetry also stands out in your artistic practice.
I read a lot of it, not only for the sake of silence, but above all because I appreciate the way in which every single word manages to be something immense despite being part of a slim text. There is a side of poetry that I consider as possible evidence of truth. Doing it, I think means being able to be sincere. I read, I often reread, and although it may be almost marble-like, that word is every time the sign of another possibility. It is engraved but it is also very alive.

You work a lot on the presentation of figures and colours, allowing the pictorial fruit to mix with the illustrative one. The result – and this is also why I mentioned poetry – seems to me to be almost like a set of “pictorial verses”.
Maybe. Even though I function through images, I feed on pauses and precious and essential moments in which I stop. I believe that this rhythm is also somehow translated onto the canvas, as if it were poetry or music, made of figures and colours.

What seems to guide you is not just a possible inspiration but also a robust obstinacy. I mean, no matter how minimal they may be, the signs you make are still an expression of your need. They are above all because they allow you to insist on the same potential of painting.
There is a sort of operational fluidity that guides me, that is, the acceptance of the formation and fixation of color and signs on the surface. For me it’s about, more or less consciously, leaving room for my need not to understand too much about what I’ve done. Following will be my way of looking and realizing – only afterwards – my actions. The very fact that I am looking for a direction, but that this is practicable precisely because I am doing the work. Painting happens.

Davide Dal Sasso

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