Matrix

Identity is a relational practice a “plural self” shaped over time, through passages and responsibilities. *

Premise

Marta Dell’ Angelo’s methodological approach unfolds as a circular process. Her practice does not simply produce images; rather, it inhabits continuous research that moves between the living body, the document (written, filmed, photographed, drawn), and its subsequent painterly transfiguration. Painting thus becomes a phenomenological device in which theories of vision intersect with a profound anthropological investigation.

Her practice is rooted in direct encounter. For many years the artist has pursued an encyclopedic investigation of postures (as evidenced by her book Manuale della figura umana, in which bodies are collected, photographed, and drawn). She does not employ abstract models, but rather engages real people in sessions that become genuine “relational performances,” focused on gesture and posture. Within the same volume, a section devoted to the upper limb, specifically the hands, presents them as a generative matrix of meaning and social bonds, rather than as a mere synecdoche of the body or an exercise in anatomical virtuosity.

The artist has frequently developed projects involving collective participation. In such contexts, the hand emerges as a symbol of care, but also of conflict. Her artistic practice thus shifts from the isolation of the studio toward an opening onto sociality: the hands “painted like stone” become a tribute to human resilience and to the hoped-for endurance of bonds in all their complexity and contradictions.
In this exhibition, through a body of works that isolates and analyses the hands, anatomy becomes even more precarious, imprecise in its distortions.

The Grid and the Optical Unconscious

Drawing on the reflections of Rosalind Krauss, Marta Dell’ Angelo’s work can be read through the lens of the matrix as an ordering structure. If, for Krauss, the modernist grid functioned as a tool to negate narration in favour of pure structure, Marta Dell’ Angelo employs a kind of “anatomical grid,” transforming hands into autonomous units of measure.

Within this fragmentation surfaces what Krauss defined as the optical unconscious: the revelation of what lies beneath the threshold of conscious vision. The hands portrayed by the artist, through involuntary, reactive gestures and everyday automatism, become become indices, physical traces of an existence that manifests itself beyond the realm of rational control.

The Social Matrix and the Energetic Circuit

As already emphasized, the artist’s research is not limited to mere formalization: hers is a work based on participant observation of the modalities of human contact. The union of multiple hands – intertwining, supporting, or brushing against one another – becomes the visible representation of a relational matrix. Her practice resembles that of a taxonomist who enacts and gives form to the infinite range of social interaction. The hand “senses” the other, the truth of the body, registering the temperatures of that encounter.

The wax-crayon graffiti and the drawings featured in the exhibition, while not preparatory works for the paintings, represent their energetic seismograph – mappings of movement within space. Here, relation is understood as a field of forces composed of proximity, friction, dependency, resistance, and adaptation.

In these works, therefore, contact is not merely a formal occurrence, but the trigger for a transfer of energy. The artwork becomes a conductor within a field of action: every union, every intertwining, turns into the terminal of an invisible network that runs through the bodies, transforming the void between subjects into a space charged with vital potential.

In an era of dematerialization, Marta Dell’ Angelo thus reaffirms the “political” necessity of contact, reading in the union of hands the first and fundamental social contract of our species. Isolating the hand in these paintings is not an act of subtraction, but of concentration, a means by which the artist synthesizes a posture that is by no means merely physical, but representative of the bonds underlying in space itself. Within the complexity of these interweavings, every form is altered through contact with the other; here, relation often does not clarify, but rather deforms and stratifies, embracing both compromises and struggles.

The hand is also what creates the work. A constant play of mirrors thus emerges: the artist uses her own hand to paint the hands of others. This “short circuit” turns her practice into a reflective investigation. The act of painting becomes a generative means of understanding the act of touching, of connecting.

Geology of the Sign: The Hand as Stone

In one of our conversation Marta recounts: “Hands knotted together, intertwined and overlapping seem to give life to details of a landscape, as if they were stones, roots, mountains, or forms belonging to the organic world.”

I would add: it’s a kind of relational geology in which the hand becomes territory.
But there is more. She continues: “The idea that the resulting form might transform into something else, moving beyond figuration, and the notion of the body as a boundary, stimulated me to explore numerous possibilities. An expansion beyond boundaries that led the hands to become the subject of this potential transformation, one that also allows us to see something else.”

In this synthesis, flesh seems to transmute its own biological transience to acquire the permanence of a biomorphic sculptural element. This crossing gives rise to a vibrant tension between the organic and the inorganic: the flesh is not simply depicted, but is “carved” by the painterly gesture, uncovering a latent lithic nature.

How does the work take shape technically? After a series of photographic shots, the artist assembles the images into a collage during the postproduction process; the collage then becomes a model that she begins to paint at an enlarged scale, suspended within a white space. “The background,” she explains, “is meant to evoke infinite space, as well as the void from which everything seems to originate. This space allows the volumetric dimension to emerge, making the subject resemble a sculpture.”

A crucial aspect of Dell’ Angelo’s poetics lies in her nature as a “stone gatherer” during her walks. Nature incorporates different species as well as human-made artifacts: her painted hands evoke this integration.

This biographical inclination is further reflected in a desaturated chromatic palette of earthy tones, calcareous grey-greens, and mineral veining, as well as in a mark that appears to sculpt matter directly onto the canvas. Her way of painting (“almost scholastic,” as she herself describes it) is transformed into a salvific gesture through the rubbing and friction of colour, capable of giving sculptural form to a two-dimensional surface.

Marta’s hands possess the density and temperature of pebbles and stones shaped by time, in which the body is nonetheless evoked. Vital form is conveyed through volume. Transforming flesh into stone and stone into flesh thus means removing relation from the perishability of biological time and entrusting it to the stability of mineral matter. The paintings are accompanied by unmistakable titles (Sandstone, Karst Stone, Stone…). A fusion is thereby achieved in which anatomy obeys laws of sedimentation: the interlocking of gestures is no longer merely human but becomes a permanent geological structure.

Just as stones are selected and fitted together to build a foundation, so Marta Dell’ Angelo assembles hands. Their union evokes a lithic interlocking, a solid and indispensable architecture upon which the entire edifice of human coexistence rests. The handstone is, ultimately, the cornerstone of her matrix: a fragment of humanity endowed with the ineluctable force of the earth. In this way, relation acquires both physical and perceptual weight.  The hands she paints restore a mineral solidity to those gestures of contact that would, otherwise, vanish into the undifferentiated flow of the everyday.

* Leandra Bruzzone, Fare mostre. Pratiche curatoriali, orizzonti di senso, 2023, Postmedia Books.