Corpo a corpo (Body to Body), a solo exhibition by Iolanda Martini curated by Nicoletta Boschiero, is not merely a retrospective of the twenty-year career of the Veronese artist, but a true emotional atlas where flesh becomes cartography of contemporary existence. In the halls of Palazzo de Probizer in Isera (TN), the body evoked by the title (omnipresent in multiple languages and degrees of explicitness) becomes by turns chronicler, territory and battlefield of an individual story elevated to the guiding thread of research on the archetypes of universal images. Through seven thematic rooms, corresponding to as many stylistic and conceptual declinations of the body (feminine, loving, glorious, mutant, anxious, dead, of the soul) Martini constructs a labyrinthine path that from the initial feminine body suspended in a crystallized condition reaches to the soul as the ultimate frontier of the incorporeal, passing through a masculine first glorious then dangerous and through a cosmogonic instinct of somatic and psychic mapping of the people she has observed (and in most cases loved).
Iolanda Martini, “Female Diptych”, 2004, acrylics on canvas, each 55.5 x 40 x 8.5 cm, courtesy of the artist
In all the works on display, what strikes from the first glance in Martini’s approach is her ability to work on the fragment understood as the primary narrative unit. This is not a disenchanted decomposition for its own sake, but a poetic strategy that recognizes in incompleteness the ontological condition of the contemporary subject. The feminine anatomical details displayed in diptych in the first room — like Ventre (Belly) and Volto (Face) (2004), with those small chains that connect eye to ear, nose to ear, navel and pubis — seem to be sensory measurement devices rather than traditional portraits. They are instrument-bodies awaiting activation, automata of perception that question the viewer about the boundary between subjectivity and objectification. The artist here employs a homogeneous and muted chromatic palette, composed of grays, ochre, earth tones, which functions as an emotional filter, as if it were a sort of temporal patina evocative of an enigmatic archaeological connotation. This is not nostalgia, but sedimentation: each work bears the signs of the time that generated it, of the biographical and social circumstances that nourished it, but also of centuries of art history stratified in her sensitive imaginary.
Iolanda Martini, “Triptych – Mr. Emeka, Ben, Odili”, 2002, acrylics on canvas, each 170 x 65 cm, courtesy of the artist
The pulsating heart of the exhibition resides in the reflection on otherness, developed primarily through the relationship with Nigerian migrants that the artist began to frequent and know in the 2000s in her establishment located near the police station in Verona, where asylum seekers would camp from the night to compete for the right to be taken in charge the following day for immigration procedures. In the paintings related to this area, such as Triptych – Mr. Emeka, Ben, Odili (2002) Martini operates on the sculptural bodies of the nude protagonists in profile a chromatic transformation of conceptual value: from black they become colored — yellow, blue, red — in a progressive shift towards an abstract categorization that confuses the perceptual expectations implicit in identification mechanisms. This is not exoticism or easy multiculturalism, but a deep reflection on the processes of idealization and subsequent disillusionment that characterize the encounter with the other. The hieratic idols of the Kouroi series (2002 – 2003) are counterparted by the photographic series dedicated to José created in 2014, perhaps the rawest moment of the exhibition path. In the black and white photographic group Accumulazione (Accumulation) and in the shots dedicated to the protagonists of the real story inspiring the project, José and his wife Olympia (the latter in color and not present in the exhibition) Martini documents with ruthless ethnographic precision the failure of a dreamed integration, the implosion of a mixed marriage through the cataloging of objects that progressively invade the domestic space. The bags full of materials recovered from dumpsters by José become, through the artist’s gaze, mountains of shattered hopes, archaeologies of the present that tell more than a thousand sociological discourses on migratory processes.
Iolanda Martini, “Accumulation”, 2014, group of black and white photographs, each 21 x 30 cm, courtesy of the artist
A significant aspect of Martini’s work is her relationship with supports. For example, the choice to paint on denim canvas (working material par excellence) and to mix coarse coffee powder with pigments when addressing themes of economic migration is not casual decorativism, but a precise political statement. Similarly, the use of another non-canonical support for painting like Aida canvas in the painting-embroideries from the Andare tornare (Going Returning) series (2004-2013) is not a simple technical variation, but arises from a biographical necessity: during the long periods spent in hospital assisting her sick father, embroidery was the only practicable medium, portable, silent. This emotionally “situated” materiality gives the works a tactile quality and semantic density that goes beyond the visual effect to evoke the spirituality of a curative ritual. The sequence of “eclipses” created during her father’s illness reworks a moment of existential suspension into a rarefied cosmogony of abstract geometries executed with needle and thread on painted embroidery canvas. The impediment of light evoked by the black holes around which the compositions of this cycle gravitate becomes a metaphor for the temporary darkening of life, while the subsequent “warlike maps” crossed by arrows and crosses, into which they evolve in the following period, translate anxiety of orientation in a loss of stable references into signs.
Iolanda Martini, “Three powerful people from behind”, 2024-2025, acrylics on canvas, 21 x 16 x 4.5 cm + 61.5 x 95 x 5 cm, courtesy of the artist
Martini seems to found her creative story on a very personal modality of interrelation between private dimension and political reflection, which the interest in technical and stylistic experimentation keeps firmly anchored to the artistic praxis, preventing both the imbalance towards narcissistic autobiographism and didactic denunciation. Explicit in stigmatization is, for example, the pictorial composition Tre persone potenti di spalle (Three Powerful People from Behind) (2024-2025), where three small portraits from behind of contemporary power figures scrutinize a stylized planetary horizon. The artist in the figures uses a pictorial technique that in its capacity for epidermal precision recalls certain Flemish masters, but puts it at the service of a merciless representation of power as totalizing obsession. The original compositional solution sees the three characters crossed by colored threads (blue, red, yellow) symbolizing the three primary drives of power: control, money, supremacy. Planet Earth is instead conceptualized as a surreal oversized jacket that each of them would like to wear, in an ironic assimilation of geopolitics to a matter of imperial wardrobe.
Iolanda Martini, “Andare ritorno”, 2004–2013, acrylic paints and embroidery on canvas, each 28 x 40 x 6 cm, courtesy of the artist
In conclusion, Corpo a corpo reveals an artist who has been able to transform her own biographical events into a universal language without losing the specificity of lived experience. Martini does not limit herself to representing the body, but uses it as a device of knowledge, as an investigation tool into the mechanisms of power, resistance and transformation that traverse contemporaneity. The exhibition confirms how art can still say something essential about our time, on condition of not settling for easy aesthetic consolations but of accepting the challenge of a confrontation body to body – precisely – with the complexity of the real. In an era of increasing virtualization of relationships, Martini’s work also claims the centrality of the physical, sensory and tactile dimension of human experience, restoring to the body its dignity as territory of meaning and existence. The path through the seven rooms of Palazzo de Probizer is thus configured as a contemporary initiatory journey, where each room represents a station of a path of knowledge that from the personal reaches the universal, from the contingent to the symbolic, from the surface to the depth of being.
Info:
Corpo a corpo. Works by Iolanda Martini 2002-2025
curated by Nicoletta Boschiero
26/07 – 21/09/2025
Palazzo de Probizer, Isera
Piazza San Vincenzo, 1 – Isera (TN)
Graduated in art history at DAMS in Bologna, city where she continued to live and work, she specialized in Siena with Enrico Crispolti. Curious and attentive to the becoming of the contemporary, she believes in the power of art to make life more interesting and she loves to explore its latest trends through dialogue with artists, curators and gallery owners. She considers writing a form of reasoning and analysis that reconstructs the connection between the artist’s creative path and the surrounding context.
NO COMMENT