Emancipation and materialisation of the shadow
In the ancient Greece cities, which were full of statues, the citizen could find his/her own image everywhere and looked at it proudly.
Now that the fine arts have been locked up in museums of cities to which men have grown more and more indifferent, one can only find his/her own shadow on the city walls, while walking very close to them; whereas most of the time such shadows remain unnoticed.
And yet De Chirico believes that a man’s shadow is more enigmatic than any religion ever existed.
During life, the body of a human being fades away, thus wears out, as Rilke once wrote. A shadow can be considered as a visible trace left by the body’s eternal fading away.
Jung maintains that every man/woman is followed by a shadow which, the more it is ignored, the thicker and darker it becomes.
The shadow is always with us even if, to become visible, it stays in the porous matter from which it sometimes re-emerges and speaks about itselfs. Our old cities have a unique atmosphere because of all the shadows that inhabit them.
In its own depth, the shadow speaks about the mystery of the human race.
Mario Martinelli has been working on the subject of the shadow’s emancipation and materialization for several years. His work consists of two phases: first, he is able to detach the shadow from the body of an unaware passer-by and presents it to him/her. Then, he covers the shadow in wire net and makes a plastic graffiti monument out of it which is finally placed on the city walls.
A) THE SHADOW’ S EMANCIPATION – Interactive installation “Meeting the shadow”
Artist Mario Martinelli travels the world carrying a big piece of cloth and a flash which he puts in front of the cloth. A passer-by would accidentally activate the flash lighting the cloth and blowing his/her shadow on it. The shadow, detached from the body, remains for some time on the still enlighten cloth.
The shadow, which has been emancipated from the body, projects a new image of itself. It becomes a dazzled discovery of a new, other “self”.
Such other “self” is the one who is dragged into the relentless rhythm of today’s life, where days pass by very quickly and what’s left is only the image of things.
Martinelli’ s installations give new shape to the most eluding feature of mankind, that is a human shadow caught in a one-time but unique moment of existence. Such shadow is then released slowly and thereby symbolizes the disappearance of a human body worn out by its own evaporation.
Martinelli’s art aims at revealing the unexpected imagine of oneself and its slowly fading away: such is the source of its emotional strength.
B- The materialisation of the shadow or shadow-in-the-net
A net figure is produced by cutting the net mesh along the profile of the shadow left by a passer-by on a special screen. Such net figure represents a piece of art where, like in Laozi’s glass, what counts is what is missing, meaning the emptiness, where the shadow no longer existing now lives.
The shadow-in-the-net is a synthetic, transparent and quiet image made almost only of emptiness and attracting the viewer into a relationship which stimulates his/her intuition, memory and imagination.
The shadow-in-the-net is then put on the wall as a sort of plastic graffiti, or a figure enjoying the ambiguous status of metal object from nearby and incorporeal shadow from afar.
Made more of emptiness than substance, the wire net is a metaphor of the world. In its language an unexpected meaning lies.
In a world of too many things and too much noise, such a call for emptiness and silence is meant to capture the one-time emanation of a body, and to make an anti-monumental monument of the “nothing”, which is the shadow. Of the more and more undervalued and precarious, and yet amazing, reality which we call “man”.
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Meeting the shadow
