Passion for colour, rhythm of the line, knowledge of the materials: The sensibility and creativeness of Giuseppe Martini go from painting to design, and are suited to the more diverse everyday objects and spaces: fabrics for interior and outdoor decoration, carpets and carpeting, wallpaper and wrapping paper, porcelains and ceramics.
Giuseppe Martini was born in Fiuggi, an historical thermal centre not far from Rome, in 1950, and after long and important international experiences both as a painter and a designer he returned to live in this town.
In this going back to the roots there is the profound, congenital, sense of beauty and of the balance between nature and ancient architecture during the changing of horizons and seasons. Since his adolescence he was a self-taught painter and he graduated in architecture at the University of Rome in 1978. From his university studies Martini learnt above all the ability to progress from the design of a sketch to the integrated realization of a whole environment, defining spaces, colours, proportions, and relationships.
While continuing and developing his research as a painter he started to spend some periods abroad, beginning with a first stay in California.
In 1983 Martini moves to Limoges, to work with the ceramics manufactures. It is an important experience, not only to learn the techniques and the materials used in the production of artistic ceramics, but also to learn about the expectations of the public, the commercial aspects of production, the inevitable and stimulating comparison with the styles of the past.
Moving to San Francisco coincided with a new phase in Martini’s artistic production, that experimented new expressive spaces both in painting and design, from pop-art to lyric abstract art, also trying new combinations and formats. In 1986 he moved from California to New York and he experienced a direct comparison with the vitality (thrilling but also contradictory) of the Big Apple. In these years Martini widened the field of application of his works to new productive sectors. Fundamental in his works are the gesture, the sign and the colour. Every decorative project, whatever its field, is first of all an artistic action: the module, the basic element, the point of departure is always an individual moment an autonomous creation.
In the year 2000 Martini it decided to leave the United States and to return to Italy, in his Fiuggi, continuing his full collaboration with renowned international manufacturing firms, open to the global market. Painting and design continue to be intertwined, and it would be reductive to separate these two activities. Martini, in other terms, is neither a painter that produces designs for the industry, neither a designer that occasionally paints. Those are two complementary ways of expression, both essential the one to the other. Through the painting, in fact, Martini exerts his freedom, while the design offers him the occasion to project the image towards new dimensions, discovering new uses and materials.
And this the best key to understand the work of Giuseppe Martini, an artist that is always able to surprise himself and to discover that, as he stated: “you never know the limits of the image: you always get to be surprised!”.
