Since 2018, Italian Contemporary Art Day has been celebrated globally, with support from the international network of Italy’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. Italian Embassies, Consular Offices, and Cultural Institutes host a variety of events, including debates, presentations, workshops, and exhibitions. In addition to showcasing artists and their works, the initiative engages producers, curators, organizers, museum directors, and critics, offering a comprehensive exploration of Italy’s contemporary art scene. The day is promoted by AMACI – the Association of Italian Museums of Contemporary Art, with the support of the Italian Ministry of Culture.
La superficie introvabile – The Unfindable Surface:
The Explorations of Anna Romanello and Mario Martinelli
JOSEPH D. CARRIER ART GALLERY
Columbus Centre
901 Lawrence Ave W | Toronto ON
OPENING
Thursday, October 17 | 7:00PM
FREE EVENT | OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
EXHIBITION
October 18 to November 13, 2024
Monday to Friday
10AM to 5PM
FREE ADMISSION
This exhibition celebrates the 2024 edition of Italian Contemporary Art Day by featuring the works of Anna Romanello and Mario Martinelli, two artists who explore symbols, history, and the passage of time.
Romanello’s Cretti installation, with its jagged black cracks, baked earth textures, and vivid orange rust streaks, evokes a sense of timelessness and transports viewers to different eras. Her work invites contemplation of place and memory, allowing for a personal journey through time.
Martinelli’s David’s Shadow, a monumental wire mesh sculpture created for the 500th anniversary of Michelangelo’s David, mirrors the height and form of the original statue, using striking chiaroscuro to bring the figure to life. Both artists masterfully layer materials and play with transparency to create immersive, timeless pieces that transcend traditional artistic boundaries.
The installation of this exhibition was overseen by Flavio Belli, Director of Toronto’s Tarantino Belli Gallery.
Presented by the Consulate General of Italy in Toronto, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura Toronto, Villa Charities and Heritage Calabria.
ABOUT ANNA ROMANELLO
Born in 1950 in Italy, she is an Artist-performer. She graduated from the Fine Arts Academy of Brera in Milan and continued her studies at the Fine Arts Academy of Paris and at the Atelier 17 of S. W. Hayter, where she experimented with etching procedures with international artists and etchers like H. Goetz and J. G. Friedlaender.
In Italy, she worked at the Calcografia Nazionale of Rome, and from 1972, she taught at various Fine Arts Academies in Italy. From 1986 to 2017, she was Professor of Etching at the Fine Arts Academy in Rome, where she developed modern etching and engraving techniques with simultaneous colours and photographic collages. She edited Artist-Books in Italy and France.
While she lived in London for various years, she developed a photographic project on the city.
She was invited to hold conferences and workshops in Academies such as Brussels, Ourense (Spain), Reggio Calabria, and Naples.
Her Works were exposed in various galleries and museums in many countries and are present in public collections like The British Museum, London; National Library, Paris; National Library, Prague and Bratislava; Calcografia Nazionale Rome; Museum E. Caraffa, Cordoba, Argentine; National Library, Florence; Communal Library Sormani, Milan; and Museum of Modern Art, Bari, Italy.
ABOUT MARIO MARTINELLI
Mario Martinelli was born in Treviso, Italy. He studied Literature at the University of Padua, where he later completed his PhD. in Contemporary Art. At the same time Mario Martinelli also studied at the ‘Accademia di Belle Arti’ (Academy of Fine Arts) in Venice. He has taught Art History for decades.
Martinelli’s work as a theorist and as a teacher has always gone hand-in-hand with his research as a practising artist. This research has evolved within a very personal theme of inward reflection, beginning in 1969 with his first ‘unwoven canvas’. Chequered patterning on a surface, intended as a pure convention, is the unifying and recurring theme of all Martinelli’s work, beginning with the ‘stessuti’ (unwovens) of the 1970s-1980s to the ‘traspareti’ which followed, the interplay of light and shadow both on canvass and on the walls of buildings.
Since the early 1990s, Martinelli’s traspareti have taken on the shape of the shadows that live within them, becoming metaphysical pirates, real entities that enjoy the ambiguous status of being both objects and, at the same time, doubles of the spirit, it’s the ‘shadows-in-the-net’.
He exhibited at the 1992 Biennale in Lausanne and at the 1995 Venice Biennale expositions.
Since then, Mario Martinelli has travelled the world and flashed and blown among the city walls the passersby’s shadows, thereby emancipating them from the bodies they belonged to and showing them on a screen which disappears little by little. They so become an ephemeral monument of the miraculous inconsistence of men, their get-to-know themselves and their own disappearance (exhibited in Venice, Milan, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Tokyo…)
When covered with the mesh of a net, these shadows, like new plastic graffiti, permanently surface on the city walls, which Martinelli insists on humanizing.
Art galleries and institutions all over the world have taken an interest in his work and have helped disseminate it. Art critics and historians consider it a poignant reaction to today’s widespread identity loss and loneliness as well as to our modern cities’ indifference for its citizens.
