The exhibition by Marta Roberti, curated by Cecilia Canziani, titled Due mondi – e io vengo dall’altro, running until April 30, 2025, at the z2o Sara Zanin Gallery in Rome, finds its essence in the decision to experience drawing as an indispensable ontological research based on a primal relationship with an atavistic universe. It is a collection of mysterious and unfathomable presences where the artist’s face completes, with spontaneity, the physicality of animal-like creatures.
Marta Roberti, “Due mondi – e io vengo dall’altro”, 2025, installation vie wat z2oSaraZanin, courtesy the artist & z2o Sara Zanin, ph. Roberto Apa
The immediate question that arises is: what value does the self-portrait have for Marta Roberti? It is certainly called to preserve the enigma of the relationship between something that is not or is not entirely, a state of being in balance, in which drawing reduces the distance from the world from which the artist comes. A technique declined in the most experimental practice, using graphite, oil pastel on carbon paper and Taiwanese mulberry, worked into an irreducible complexity of thin lines forming filaments. However, in this archaic simplicity, which turns skies into soils and seas into waves, there is a constant presence of a strange alchemy that unites the animal world with the human one.
Marta Roberti, “Autoritratto in posa di fenicottero”, 2023, disegno e collage con grafite e pastello a olio su carta carbone fatta a mano su carta di gelso taiwanese, 140 x 214 cm, ph. Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist & z2o Sara Zanin
The common factor in all the works is the absence of a specific place; the figures appear immersed in the albuminous white of the thin paper that embraces them, and even where an attempt is made to define a natural territory, it is only the depicted elements that make it such. Therefore, despite the absence of water, strange fish appear in the primordial liquid of the sea, moving in a calm march. The images of one of the two worlds – as the title, taken from a text by Cristina Campo, states – in which Roberti recognizes herself, is undoubtedly a desert place, characterized by a harsh dryness that allows only small, leafed palms to survive. These might be primordial memories of a journey to Egypt, fragments of images, remnants of lost worlds, evocations of distant readings, places of memory torn by a fleeting recollection.
Marta Roberti, “Due sorelle a confronto con il caos”, 2025, disegno e collage con grafite e pastello a olio su carta carbone fatta a mano su carta di gelso taiwanese, 150 x 365,5 cm, ph. Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist & z2o Sara Zanin
The variability of the sense of the paper’s dimensions is equally important: each figure opens into space with an unrelated attitude, so even if the sizes of the sheets do not align, the figure emerges with extreme naturalness. Yet, what is depicted does not aim to tell a story; rather, it seeks to bring out the need to draw the visible to capture the invisible aspect of that world – that is, the sense of movement and its serene quietude. Thus, precisely because the drawing exercise and the absence of depth make it possible, Roberti explores states in motion such as: the awareness of the emptiness felt in flight, the act of contortion and the sensation of the fall found in diving. These are actions that experiment with the sense of magnitude in relation to what a small section of a drawing can offers, thus representing the origin of a world that could unfold at any moment beyond the walls.
Marta Roberti, “Tuffatrice”, 2025, disegno e collage con grafite e pastello a olio su carta carbone fatta a mano su carta di gelso taiwanese, 111 x 138cm, ph. Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist & z2o Sara Zanin
Therefore, the exhibition represents a skilled and successful effort to undo the classic representation that the artist has of herself, instead giving rise to her own unnatural physical presence. It is the union of different moments from a mythical time, consumed in the same place and linked in an infinite relationship between their cause and effect. Thus, the works can be seen as fragments of a narrative that chases itself without ever clearly defining itself, except at the precise point where Roberti unexpectedly appears with an aquiline nose, thin lips and eyebrows, dreamy eyes. The artist is further present beneath the spotted skin of a cheetah, in the head of a hissing boa, not because Roberti wishes to hide, but rather with the intent to present herself as a necessary element for reflection, or more precisely, to reflect herself, leading us to think about how we inadvertently see ourselves in everything we look at. This represents a particular way of experiencing the work, inviting us to consider the entire surface of the wall that hosts the drawings as the place where the image appears without any real resemblance. Indeed, the artist, appearing with her own features or otherwise those of her sister, always dominates the space and not the place where she imagines living. For her, nothing is figurative, but figurational, alluding to something symbolic and allegorical that lies beyond what is depicted, but of which we are only given a few hints. Therefore, what is defined in the exhibition are the figurative outcomes of a storyteller artist, who describes the effect without wanting to find the cause, and it is precisely here that the features of the human and the animal touch until they become indistinguishable.
Marta Roberti, “Un mare di pesci”, 2024, 70 x 310 cm, disegno e collage con grafite e pastello a olio su carta carbone fatta a mano su carta di gelso taiwanese, ph. Roberto Apa, courtesy the artist & z2o Sara Zanin
However, to a careful eye, the paper, characterized by free fraying and ripples, fixes an essential and foundational space. The eye, following the irregular contours, proceeds on a slow journey, remaining enchanted by a world devoid of objects but traversed by an inextricable whirlwind of winds of varying intensity that caress the down of the ibis, the feathers of the flamingo and the skin of the artist. And still, the images of that world follow one another before our eyes; chaos, in the form of a serpentine blue object, twists, while the tigers, arranged symmetrically like in an archaeological construction from ancient Mycenae, guard the exit toward the spaces rather than the entrance. Therefore, for Roberti, territoriality is reversed into an anonymous and generic universality, as for the artist, constructing the places that support the actions themselves is a fertile and necessary operation aimed at finding a time of natural relaxation. In this way, the trembling vibrato of the pastel strokes that nourish the fibers of the delicate paper acquire a sense of movement and suspension, to the point of inducing disbelief at the similarity between what is seen and what truly is, to the extent that we wonder why these creatures have a human physiognomy and where their essence derives from. The answers to all this are enclosed in a sense of intimate and tenacious secrecy, which seeks neither to be discovered nor unfolded.
Info:
Marta Roberti. Due mondi – e io vengo dall’altro
z2o Sara Zanin
01/03/2025 – 30/04/2025
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday, from 12pm to 7pm
www.z2ogalleria.it
Via Alessandro Volta 34, 00153, Roma
Maria Vittoria Pinotti (1986, San Benedetto del Tronto) is an art historian, author, and independent critic. She currently is the coordinator of Claudio Abate’s photographic archive and Manager at Elena Bellantoni’s Studio. From 2016 to 2023 she was the Gallery Manager in a gallery in the historic center of Rome. She has worked with ministerial offices such as the General Secretariat of the Ministry of Culture and the Central State Archive. Currently, she collaborates with cultural sector magazines, focusing on in-depth thematic studies dedicated to modern and contemporary art.
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