Diario di Viaggio (Travel Book)  
     
  In viaggio. Europa  
     
  Bikes and what's before their eyes  
     
  What I leave out  
     
  Coming out  
     

AN OUTLINE OF REVIEWS...


Lucia Anelli
The artist represents places – usually urban landscapes – in which she inserts recurrent element: movement, overturn, multiplicaiton and rarefaction of subjects, color emerging from the black and white background. Movement is also conceived as the process of multiplication, materialization and dematrialization of elements of the image, that leave a trace made of moments following one after the other, each being the only and unrepeatable one. Different copies of the same subject suggest different ways for he/she/it to be, other dimensions and possibilities of his/her/its life. In time, the multipication of isolated elements has evolved into the presence of “parallel landscapes”, that appear as a whole at a first glance, then reveal themeselves as independent places, being one the ghost of the other.

Mirella Casamassima
Photography, computer and painting are Maria Maritnelli’s media: travel books […] where the aim is to catch what brain and senses registered well before the click did: something whose multiplicity, fluidity, heterogeneity cannot be expressed by the photographic result; the picture is already a dead image (R. Barthes), it is a present-past (W.Wenders). What’s to be done to return it to life? Movment- routes traced by following moments; multiplication – different copies of the same subject – different ways of being; overturn  – upside-down images – different points of view, “otherness”; colors – being physical and organic against the immateriality of the photo […] an interlacement of languages as painting, photography, digital graphics, about the theme of non-place, about that area of uncertainty that cannot be planned, non-plan, where the distinction of time and space of the urban age is transformed into isotopic heterotopic, utopian areas, suggesting that also nomads, artists and poets can take possession of the territory again if they can find breaches in the city.

Marilena Di Tursi
Martinelli’s works on travel as an epiphanic experience, as a revelation, as an idea, conveniently translated on a technical basis deleting parts of the image until it reaches a cloudy consistency that calls to mind the confused emerging of memories.In these last works, a cold and hallucinated chromatic factor prevails, with human beings more like ghosts, in a perceptual play that puts together places far from each other, emphasizing things they have in common (posters, neon lights) and organizing them in diptyches where the main subject is the underground.
The video presented here is a new experience, where moving frames give an explanation and also a poetic sense to the appearing-disappearing, through the figure of a dreamy cyclist who goes from a place to another, leaving each place deleted behind him.

Antonella Marino
Here Martinelli’s large images stand out as bright apparitions, rips emerging from a dark frame with unusual lighting of colors. The artist’s ideal and mental travel  proceedes, alighting on the inside of the underground of European cities. Are we in Berlin, Bruxelles or Milan? It’s difficult to say. A perfect photographic merging combines two or more places, through complex digital elaborations that undo space-time coordinates and creates a holistic dreamlike “elsewhere”. Cyclic nature, splitting, blurriness and vanishing are found also in the interesting début of the artist with the video: in this first one, the succeeding phases that underlie her two-dimensional works come to life and give a vision of their visionary complexity, through a step by step editing obtained through sophisticated animatronics.

Pietro Marino
Quotations and emotions of travelling through Europe crowd Maria Martinelli’s ghostly visions. They are the arrivino point of an elaborate path that is also technical research, starting from digital photo and passing through a work of removal, consumption and arrangement. So life, quivering and coagulating through the streets and the squares of Bruxelles, Praga, Amsterdam, slacks and stops when observed. Space looses definition, colors slim, figures tend to loose themselves in a sort of fog that is rising slowly.
Memories of places overlap and dwell together... But it is not chaos or decay; it is rather absorption, rarefaying, distance: the snapshot is replaced by the patient meditation that looks for a rearrangement of the images according to new structures. It becomes a new mental place to live in, rebuilt either through formal balance or through assonance of situations emerging from the flow of memories. We can smell the scent of eastern ecstasy,  dropped into the metropolitan fringes.

Giusy Petruzzelli
The artist’s eye. Contribution to an aesthetics of the traveller
Travel has been for longtime the core of Maria Martinelli’s poetics. The artist observes places through the mediation of the photographic eye, then she comes back to those images and elaborates them either by digital techniques or by painting. The outcome of this complex work on images is the estrangement with respect to the real, identifiable object. So, the relationship between the final work and the object has been complicated by a number of mental and technical elaborations.
Some people think that travel can be actualized “around one’s own room”  (paraphrasing the title of a writing by Xavier De Maistre); on the contrary, in Martinelli’s view, distance and difference are both relavant factors: she’s intrigued by universes other than her own daily life, by the mulplicity of identities that belong to human beings located somewhere else, by those forms of visible reality that are different from the already known.
All this makes the difference between a photo that belongs to the travel reportage and a work where places are only the starting point for something new. The artist creates new worldviews and the miracle of art happens each time the object or the image born from the artist become our owns and we feel and recognize them as belonging to the human race all the time.

Maria Vinella
Putting out of context and then building a new context of places, Martinelli commits her poetics to paradox and absurdity. At a first glance, images look like usual urban or rural landscapes but when we observe them closely, details come out from a special travel book where the geographic site is nothing but a hint to get in touch with areas lost beyond the threshold of consciousness. What each journey promises is then the encounter with one’s self and with otherness.