Reviews

Reflections of the soul

In times dominated by technology, Mena Martini’s art springs from her sensitiveness, from the way she looks at the world and from her hands, as a primary need to confer a golden depth to the appearance of things.

The artist is captivated by a passion for the fullness of emotions that are aroused by colours in an intimate primordial explosion; her work is born in a bold and impetuous genesis. She follows each sense, pursues each beat of a thought, every possible path from the soul to the surface, creating colour, painting.

The work becomes a sort of visual non-place, accented by notable brushstrokes, where hues penetrate each other in varied harmonic tones, among composite rigours and emotional tides.

The artist becomes the first to observe the development, the revelation of a work that at its origin is but an idea.

Thus, magically, a show is put on by thin evanescences, the flowering of shadows, of semblances, of nebulae, of feeble presences, of shapes floating in a supreme equilibrium of disclosures and concealments, unexpected darkenings and revelations.

It can be said that this artist’s work is not cerebral: no pain, anxiety or existential suffering pushes her through her mysterious creational journey. Instead, one sees the glow of spiritual exercise inherent in the execution of the painting.

Indeed, the attractiveness of the paintings does not end with the seductive impact of light on their surface; an inner light reverberates from the works, provoking an instinctive and ineffable impression.

Likely inspired by the marvelous Canadian landscape that surrounds her, and as a result of her attention toward abstract expressionism, Mena Martini pierces an extremely personal vision of nature that becomes a reflection of her soul.

Renato Bianchini, Art Critic, Pescara, Italy

With weightless brushstrokes and floating colour, Mena Martini paints gauzy landscapes — half-forgotten empires, imagined horizons, invisible cities.  They contain a light that suggests something unmistakable, rare, perhaps magnificent. Her cities are home for our projected desires, our imagined futures, our morning-after dreams, and our hazy memories of moments that could not be fixed in language, but only glimpsed, hinted at.

Her work always already embodies something that is lost, and the possibility of something that might soon be found.

 Katherine Somody, ArtBomb Curator, Vancouver, Canada

Mena’s paintings create a spiritual doorway, they depict a deepening state of meditation. Mena uses her palette as a veil reminding us that some sacred mysteries are not meant to be understood.

Her colours and their vaporous quality convey the emotion involved in these changing states (…) impart a fascination with the liminal. (These are very short stages amidst time of change when day becomes night, summer becomes autumn, a sound calms and becomes silence). In the original Latin Lumina means threshold and Mena’s work as an artist focuses at maintaining the viewer in the space of the threshold, suspending time and freezing the moment at which transformation is about to take space. Therefore Mena’s paintings give us the opportunity to rest and reflect before these stages occur, for once something has emerged from the threshold it is not the same as before.

 Angela Clark, Curator at il Museo, Il Centro, Vancouver, Canada