At the beginning it was woolen, and created polychromatic yarn weavings, with warm changing figurations. Then the artist used iron wire, interlaced in regular, netlike geometries.

Thread represents traces, trails, prints, and is thus a pale sign of a course to follow, a reasoning we have to shape. Just like lines, threads have no thickness nor depth, but only the dimension of length. Thread is a one-dimensional sign that points out orientation, an axis, but does not point towards a direction.

Thread represents traces, trails, prints, and is thus a pale sign of a course to follow, a reasoning we have to shape. Just like lines, threads have no thickness nor depth, but only the dimension of length. Thread is a one-dimensional sign that points out orientation, an axis, but does not point towards a direction.

Martinelli has built his shadow poetics on the theme of thread. By cutting, superimposing and projecting light metal nets, he has extended this filiform trace giving it an identity, or, at any rate, recognizability. He shapes his nets in human profiles caught in the moment they appear, as they proceed in space and time or he depicts objects or animals. Everything has its own shadow; the latter is not the thing itself, but the representation of the thing- its analagon - or, perhaps, its sign. One is always suspicious, always afraid a shadow might become independent.

There's no need to highlight the anthropological implications of this work. The shadow is the memory of the body- what, in its inconsistency. roots it to the world. For those who lived in Platonic caves, shadows were reality: shadows of the dead are the disquieting memory of lost existence; those who have been deprived of their shadow, such as von Chamisso's Peter Schlemihl, atone for this mutilation through social condemnation: in fact, Brant Stocker's Dracula cast no shadow, nor was his image reflected in mirrors. In the Doppelgdnger's wild pathology- the "double" that was so eagerly sought after by the Romantics and is now the object of in-depth study in modern psychoanalysis- shadows duplicate beings with perturbing mirror-like images. But fixed on a lime- washed wall in Hiroshima, someone's corroded.

Bleak shadow has remained: someone who was dissolved by atomic power in a matter of seconds.

Martinelli's shadows, however, have nothing sinister about them. On the contrary, through the amused wonder they arouse, they bring to mind the childish innocence of shadow puppets. Above all, they somehow set themselves as our projection into the everyday universe, fixing a unique moment into its anonimity. In a way, they remind us of the fleeting character Pessoa described, who was to be viewed "not with the unheedful attention we give to things, but with the defining attention we attach to symbols.

It was nobody's symbol: that's why it was in a hurry."