Martino Coppes

Bonomo Gallery, Rome
Through May 7

The “historical” works by Martino Coppes shown at the Bonomo gallery go back over his artistic journey starting in the early Nineties, offering emblematic examples of his operating process, through which photography transforms a series of objects into Landscapes, Flowers, Cells. All of these then become the focus of art: in a kind of “visionary evaporation”, through color and light a transfiguration is made. Coppes’ working method actually involves the elaboration of the object trouvé, elective object for imagination rich in fantastic visions performing the transposition from reality to imagination put effectively into practice by technology. The artist uses photography, or rather photographic re-elaboration, according to a ritual that consecrates objects taken from the everyday – industrial discards, small plastic arrangements, natural materials – and tests their visual properties, the ability to expand into secret landscapes, hidden in the depth of matter, capable of suggesting the existence of novel life potential, offering sustenance to imagination. And so, particularly in the first works, there are some just hinted at life forms dispersed in those landscapes, that seem lifted from cartoons or the “tales” of magic realism. From glacial deserts to luminous caves, from sidereal landscapes to crystal flowers, down to Cells, actual end-point of his work, all the imaginary developed by Coppes is part of a trend, recurring especially in contemporary British photography, where images presenting familiar and unknown points of view replace the attention to urban landscape; the compulsive fascination with objects focuses the drives of desire, fear, and alienation from reality, so that the private world supplants it and places, people, and ordinary life exist only as a shadow, just grazed. In this concentration of color and light one finds a new fantastic elaboration of the everyday that, as in the most ancient myths, has the purpose of restoring grace and power of imagination to the mind, by exploring the ability to recall. “Vision precedes ideas, as ideas precede projects” says Martino Coppes. This statement summarizes a process that sees a detail as a crumb of truth through which one can go back to the hypothetical original object. Coppes’ “luminescent architectures”, as so many shapes made of translucent paper run through by a ray of light, constitute a metaphysical space which can be followed, unwinding in the unreachable emptiness represented by the Idea. In the backward journey performed by this show one can also see the artist’s change from his initial training in sculpture to photographic depiction. The bidimensionality of photography retains only sculpture’s spatial echoes, while it sublimates its form and transcends its mass.




Angelo Capasso
Translation by Bruna Pegoraro Brylawski