Marta Biagini’s “Insights” are an opening to a different world, not opposed to the real one, but an inherent world. It is a more subjective look at a different, ontological dimension of the natural world, with which we have a peculiar relationship, regarding the understanding and familiarity of cosmic elements and the surrounding space.
Intuition is defined as the psychic ability to see images beyond the capabilities of normal vision. It concerns a subconscious process, directly linked to experience and part of a secondary human nature, while projecting knowledge, which is produced in ways far from the senses and logic.
Perception through experience is related to factors that exert a direct influence and are determined by both subjective beliefs and the general cultural background. The artist activates this process of perception and presents thirty-one paintings, in which the distinction between the subjective and objective elements of the empirical space is achieved.
Her work is divided into two categories. The first concerns the subjective self and her perspective on morphological elements approaches surrealism, while the second, which draws inspiration from the objective world, displays recognizable forms, integrated into a more gentle poetics, which discovers the paradox of the two worlds.
In the unity of the purely surrealist works, the canvas is overwhelmed by abstract, biomorphic shapes that float in space. The otherworldly places do not obey Euclidean geometry, but through their shadows and contours they submit the three-dimensional space, thus depicting a different reality. The chromatic organisms, creations of the subconscious, float and develop within the hallucinatory areas of the mind, where time is visibly absent. Past and future are confused in a large present. The design is strict and the forms it shapes appear closed, which gives a character of stability. The color spreads smooth and uniform, without visible residues and textures, thus promoting the wholeness that characterizes this, the subjective universe.
The second category includes works in which the pictorial elements continue to have a relationship with objective reality, even if fragmentarily. The colors are presented more softly and the forms cease to be entrenched in relation to their environment. This second world develops more proportionally and more dynamically. The space here is defined by architecture, objects and plants, which are meaningfully condensed in each composition. Faces and bodies are incorporated into the abstract constructions that complete the dream world. The connection between the forms is unclear, thus projecting a structural relationship, which at first glance is based on the absurd. The realistic elements do not appear as information of a specific narrative, but as fragments, each of which contains its own meaning and thereby contributes to a whole, from which the pure expression of the painter is revealed.
The function of the art of “insights” is not for knowledge, nor for anything practical. Its purpose is to reveal the conflict between instincts and emotional logic for the sake of expression.
The two different perspectives, on the same inner world, propose the contradiction between conscious and unconscious. The order and strict purity enjoyed by the forms of abstract, surrealist works, contrasts with the fluidity and osmosis, which prevails in the compositions that maintain their contact with elements of reality. Thus, it stands against the already formed knowledge, regarding the free state that prevails in the space of the unconscious and the recognizable order, which characterizes consciousness and logic.
The artist organizes a different structure of her pictorial world, where ambiguity prevails between the relationships of its parts and with its existence seeming doubtful, but without being rejected. Nothing works in succession, but everything harmonizes on the basis of a different worldview, which foregrounds emotion, which is filtered through human experience and translates morphology into a subjective, expressive process.
The set of works exudes an inner power, which makes this different existence noticeable, which acquires substance in color and potential forms. Biagini, with her “insights”, develops a rhetoric regarding the consideration of human interiority and the perception of the external environment, with the aim of searching for and communicating a more essential and authentic space.
Konstantinos Bourazanis Art Historian A.S.K.T.
“PARISHES” 2021
Following Marta’s artistic path, one can see a path from the anxious painterly search, through her inner world and her social anxiety. Works mainly of faces and expressions with perfect figurative realization. Is it enough to be art? Perfection, no, in itself is not enough and perhaps distracts from art. But when she succeeds and expresses the soul, in Spazi della Mente, (Spaces of the Mind) then yes, it is art.
It realizes the inexpressible and at the same time expresses a person’s concern about what is happening around and within him.
She finds that she needs more to express her anguish. Thus comes the connection of her works with the Renaissance and Mythology, the germ of the metaphysical and the transcendent. Her Medea, a work intensely plastic but also wild as the myth demands. A tragic work of wild beauty.
At the same time, the well of hope as my ignorance perceives it, with the wreath of pebbles. An imaginary sense that each person has according to their own understanding.
The path continues with works of intense plasticity and use of colors, music. Paintings of metaphysical hue, spontaneous symbolism that both subdue and elevate.
Here the surreal and the metaphysical coincide. But perhaps this is always the case. But it is rarely expressed in a way that is so modern.
It also has a beauty that captivates at first glance and as one continues to observe, it leads to paths, thoughts, and reflections that the creator, intentionally or unintentionally, makes us trace.
One fantasizes about something that might exist(?). But even if Marta’s art does not exist, it is full of anxiety, restlessness, poetry. A visual poetry, free without limitations of imagination, which at the same time, even though it seems an oxymoron, does not leave the Pegasus of her painting uncontrolled.
A journey that continues within the spaces of the mind, among labyrinths and hopes.
Lighthouses and lighthouse-like buildings, investigative (if one can say so) and restless, pushing the mind to imagine a modern Babel.
Lighthouses, omniscient researchers, reveal unexplored paths hidden in the depths of the mind.
Where are they driving?
Do they want to drive?
They’re probably driving to “inside the dig”.
And it is impossible to ignore the elegant birds that for me travel, search for the afterlife, flee from Logic.
The course of the birds is rivaled by a high-flying kite(p.), escaping from the rooms of the mind on a course of hope? Of the future?
Besides, Marta’s works are not logic or science. They are art.
Works of art that, as they are worked on over time, acquire colors and color combinations and a geometry of shapes that may have an unconscious starting point in their architectural past, but to me it brings to mind (views of) De Chirico and Magritte. And I am not referring to a comparison of artistic greats but to the fact that talented artists learn and assimilate the teaching and works of important masters.
Marta’s art surprises, even delights. It is not aestheticism, she expresses her inner world with the tools of painting.
Art is advancing.
Go ahead Marta (we are waiting for newer ones).
All of the above are personal opinions. De profundis, not artistically documented. I don’t have the corresponding infrastructure, after all. But that doesn’t prevent me from expressing what I feel and what I receive from the works of my dear friend.
Yannis Papadakis
“FOLLOWING” 2018
“Colorful places, drawn from the caress of imagination and the memory of realism, compose the pictorial world of Marta Biagini. Under the title “Spaces of the Mind”, the exhibition primarily brings to mind the sense of a poetic fragility that is expressed not with words, but with a brush and painting techniques and materials.
Marta, an architect for years, a painter since childhood, succeeds in her works to harmoniously unite her two great loves. Architecture with its strict rules, with the freedom of artistic practice. In a warm, metaphysical, surrealistic embrace, and in full motion, spaces of the mind, with buildings as a point of reference, open their doors for swirls of thought on boundless journeys.
Hidden within these architectural structures, a wandering yeast. One could say that they resemble hideouts that challenge you to visit them and wander inside, outside and around them. To walk on their rhythmic tiles. To traverse their open passages through stairs. To search to find what is hidden behind their small and large symbolisms. Somewhere there is stone and whimsical flowers. And there is also sun and blue sea at dusk.
It is true, the element of symbolism abounds in all of Biagini’s works, while the architecture itself contains symbolism. Sometimes they refer to Greek, island complexes or ancient palaces. Sometimes to tall, cylindrical mansion towers, of a bygone era. To neighborhoods or conical fortresses. Elements of nature accompany them. Skies, trees, birds.
And in all of this, man is absent.
Human figures are found in a second group of her works presented in the exhibition. These are portraits placed in architectural environments, sometimes more defined (rooms, spaces) and sometimes placed on an abstract background composed of various geometric motifs.
The faces have been rendered according to a personal artistic style, with their realism distorted. The dominant point in all the figures is their expression and their gaze. With eyes moist and with a serious expression, they look at the viewer or somewhere else. Somewhere high up. As if silently, immersed in themselves, they seem to be envisioning, or as if they want to escape from their present, to the land of their dreams.”
Art historian Nikolena Klaitzaki
“SPACES OF THE MIND” 2018
Marta Biagini not only has a fertile imagination that creates images and forms, thanks to which she frees the expressive possibilities of the unconscious. Making use of surrealist automatic writing, she decodes stimuli and sensations that she receives from her environment, from relationships and impressions, from memory records and archetypal conditions, transforming them into labyrinthine visual fields.
Her artistic reflection focuses on the reconstruction of a reality that comes from the very origins of writing, as a way of trajectories, various dots and sequences of the line. A line that, with its windings and returns, with its densities and dilutions, with its rhythmic formations and oscillations, creates grids through which the established and the unestablished, the obvious and the supposed, the enigmatic and the paradoxical are interconnected.
The “landscapes” that Marta Biagini’s abstract and gestural writing reveals are reminiscent of lacy screens, which unify and simultaneously separate the “being” from the “appearance” of a fluid and active sequence of situations. If the existential specificity of the writing itself defines the transformations and metamorphoses of the “I”, this first-person singular, in the painter’s works, acquires the multifacetedness and plural number of “we”, as a consciousness of a dramaturgy of multifaceted events that concern the objects and the unseen, of a past that becomes present, without however being limited to captivating determinations.
The viewer is drawn to and at the same time unconsciously entangled in the labyrinths of writing that, above all, define the qualities, texture, intensities and hue of the space itself. A space that deconstructs and restructures, changes and constantly overturns the possibilities of ensuring logic. The place of this multi-potent space is occupied by topological grids, which sometimes color and sometimes decolorize with semitones the different developments of their parts, which not only converse with each other, but also attribute organic sequence to the whole, activating in the viewer the function of association.
In Marta Biagini’s works, space is identified with time and light, as microscales respond to macroscales of “events” that transcend the self-sufficiency of the “ego”. Each visual field is equivalent to the positive and negative of its presence, as if the viewer communicates with the positive and at the same time with the negative of a photograph, because the aim, in this particular unit of works, is not to reveal only the transformations of an “image”, but the synergies as these indicate the very morphogenesis, through space, time and luminescence, of a visual field that, as a screen, pulsates with life, contracts and unfolds, contracts and expands, bringing to the fore the concept and dynamics of graphic design. Through the superposition of its networks and rotation, its simplicity and transformability, its complexity and tracery, the body of writing, like a multicellular organism, is transformed into a body of matter that is restructured and reconstructed, seeking the authenticity and verisimilitude of its fleeting presence.
Athena Schina Art Critic and Historian
“REPETITIONS AND NEWNESS” 2011
Looking at the works of this artist, I feel the unconscious emerging as during dreams. A dream phase that, when it ends, allows us to connect free words, thoughts and images, without limitations. This is Biagini’s true surrealism, which starts from a point and then, slowly builds a writing around it, following inexhaustible paths. In her works we observe a strong imaginative potential, as she leads the deeper self to reach a cognitive state, beyond reality, in which wakefulness and dream are present and harmoniously reconcile each other. At the same time, with clear and real images, the artist develops forms that are not always decipherable, but are wisely connected to each other, giving life to enigmatic figures that stimulate emotions and cause emotions. Marta’s way of expressing herself suggests an analytical ability towards the surrounding world and those who are part of it.
Everything fluctuates through looks and behaviors, which are strongly imbued with meaning. In her imaginary images, the color shades and shapes give the dominant value to the work.
The little refugees look at us expressing a primordial pain, which asks, which judges and which sweetly condemns our indifference, without oppressing. But it leads us to constantly question ourselves and to make a constant reexamination of consciousness. The works are beautiful and full of meaning, to look at them, to reflect on them and to keep them in your heart.
Elena Orlando, Art Critic
“THE HARMONIOUS AND IMAGINATIVE RHYTHM OF ART” 2013
The Red Book, by Carl Jung, is a description of the author’s inner experiences. A kind of psychological biography. This book is illustrated with many drawings made by him. He considered these drawings to be an externalization of his experiences. They were the expression of the “objective soul”, that is, the expression of elements that are common to all.
We know that the artist lives with obsessions. He repeats – again and again – images, symbols and situations that have a special charge for him. Monomania is his characteristic.
Marta Biagini does the same. In her previous exhibition on hats, her real aim was to visually express the symbols that the figures wore on their hats. Each figure referred to an image or a stereotype or an archetypal symbol.
In her current exhibition, she continues this problematic. Her watercolors and oils on this theme constitute a play with the elements of memory.
Her writing resembles the automatic writing of the surrealists or the corresponding technique of Cocteau. The drawing begins, therefore, with a random point. Little by little, she creates forms that lead to archetypal elements of memory. The tower, the window, the staircase are some of them. Of course, this process can also be reversed. To start with a characteristic symbol and then improvisation to follow. In both cases, the result must be the same. To emerge visually the legacy of memory that is common to all and exists within us.
The process we have described corresponds to the two levels of memory that the artist accepts. On the one hand, there is an instantaneous memory that refers to a kind of form. You draw differently if you are calm, differently if you are angry or sad. It is a kind of instantaneous memory, a response to the immediate stimuli of the environment and the senses. This level refers to improvisation which varies from work to work depending on the emotional state of the artist. However, there is also the permanent memory that helps in the expression of the archetypes that the artist seeks to formulate. It accepts the classical meaning of art which is nothing more than the free play of the imagination that comes out effortlessly and spontaneously. . Whatever the imagination does not forget validates the possibility of existence. The asymmetry between reality and imagination is not resolved visually but is mediated by the power of the imaginary. Her designs test all the infinite possibilities between the General and the Particular, of thinking with the imagination based on criteria that are not given a priori based on some categories but alternate like a game.
Biagini focuses on the concept of the whole and composition. Principles that she borrows from architecture. When she paints a tower, she is not only interested in presenting a symbol but how it will be integrated together with the elements of improvisation into a whole. The form must be total. The work of art is not a set of parts but is something more than its parts. The search for the overall image, the gestalt, is her goal.
Panagiotis S. Papadopoulos, Art Historian
“THE FREE PLAY OF IMAGINATION“ 2014
Many artists who moved within the framework of the Surrealists used the hat as a theme in their work. Marta Biagini also belongs to this tradition.
The faces in her work who wear hats are depicted without any particular expressiveness. They do not differ from one work to another. The expression of the form does not matter. What matters is the symbols they wear on their hats. Each form refers to an image, to stereotypes or to situations.
Biagini does not create full-length figures. The work begins with the depiction of the head. Her works are strange police ID photos in which the faces are presented with a limited and discreet expressiveness until you raise your gaze a little higher to see the real hidden world they carry.
Its symbols: charm and amorousness, motherhood, the feeling of freedom. The floating but clearly formulated psychoanalytic symbols, which express oppression, confinement, sadness and denial but also the existential impasse. Protectiveness, tenderness, fantasy and eroticism, the urban landscape and nature, escape and the feeling of freedom or simply daydreaming are some others. The list can be continued indefinitely. The subject becomes a fruitful tool without however turning into a manner
Because the hat in Biagini’s work is the very expression of the human condition.
Panagiotis S. Papadopoulos Art Historian Critic
“HATS” 2006
Every exhibition by Marta Biagini is also a surprise. Combining the patience and sensitivity of an archaeologist with the inner wisdom of a psychoanalyst, she brings to light raw material from the depths of her soul and dares to highlight it, to reveal it before our astonished eyes.
It is a laborious process. For those who were lucky enough, like me, to know her, this struggle, this anguish of self-exploration is engraved on her face. Those who were not so lucky need only see her works, a reflection of this struggle. And I am not just talking about the – often imperceptible – contractions of tension in her figures. Equally eloquent is the silence of the archetypal shapes that surround them. Shapes that are unreal, extralogical, but how else can she shape the invisible, the ineffable?
Her colors – on the earthly scale – are in harmony with the shapes and their charge. A mini chromatic revolution occurs in her latest works with children. It is perhaps inevitable, the colors of the child’s soul are brighter and more optimistic.
In an era like today, when Arthur Danto speaks of the end of art and when art is considered everything that is proposed as art, Marta Biagini’s painting shines with its honesty, its courage, its sensitivity and its painterly quality.
I leave once again fascinated by her exhibition.
Dimitris Sklidis Artist, Teacher of Painting and Art Theory
“EXHIBITION IN THREE SECTIONS” 2005
The new work of Marta Biagini explores the landscape. The theme of her works finds inspiration from the Konitsa area and appear beautiful, thoughtless and ideal. From this inspiration, our souls are soothed.
For awhile, we are transported in a mental journey towards an idyllic and almost therapeutical world. The works of this collection reflect the relationship without time, of man, with nature and environment, the source and foundation of human life. This is an integral part of material reality, where development occurs through solidarity.
The concept of “Terra Madre”, of feminine nature and dynamics, is examined primarily through the archetype of the “Great Mother” (according to Jung). An innate and universal psychic model that exists in the collective unconscious of all people, with its dual quality.
“Terra Madre” represents the source of life, nourishment, and shelter. It is associated with fertility and growth: just like earth, which gives life to plants, the same way a mother gives nourishment and support non-judgemental love and care. Mother’s love expresses comfort, safety and complete acceptance, an instinctive wisdom that goes beyond logic. Transformation and rebirth, like the cycle of nature (birth, death, rebirth), are linked to the possibility of psychic transformation.
At the same time, the dark and terrifying side of the archetype, which is equally important, is recognized. Earth is a place of death and decay, which ultimately demands what it gave at birth.
“Terra Madre” represents the source of life, nourishment, and shelter. It is associated with fertility and growth: just like earth, which gives life to plants, the same way a mother gives nourishment and support, non-judgemental love and care. Mother’s love expresses comfort, safety and complete acceptance, an instinctive wisdom that goes beyond logic. Transformation and rebirth, like the cycle of nature (birth, death, rebirth), are linked to the possibility of psychic transformation.
With these concepts, and always through gradual changes, Marta Biagini observes and captures everything that evolves around her. The gentle stimulations of nature and the non-hierarchical spaces allow us to rest, with the colors of bushes, leaves and branches, flowers, and fir trees. Hours of silence and isolation, connection and reflection create a boundless space that makes us feel like “our home in the world.”
Maria E Papadimitriou, Museologist
the world without frontiers, by Marta Biagini