“The search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of life,” wrote Italo Calvino in “six proposals for the next millennium”, best known as “American Lessons”. Even if the reference is abused, is what I immediately thought in seeing the stimulants paintings of Martina Roberts. With fresh genuineness, this flâneuse of everyday life, enchanted by the particular lover of the most empty of full, attentive to a balanced composition that balances sparse backgrounds and subtle but vibrant chromaticity, seems to want to lead to a different world, a world that apparently no longer belong to us, as we are crushed by the the weight of an heavy existence with apparently no way out. E ‘then a warning, perhaps an invitation to deprive us of our armor, to wear clothes more light (in the wake of a great twentieth-century tradition, such as Mirò and Klee, Calder, Melotti), to get involved with small things and the essence of the human, to cast his gaze over the obstacle, to a world of clear transparency, dreamy, magical balance, even between “networks” and “shop window” of fascinating city streets. But there is a world enchanted properly, and if in part it seems, is still, like every fairy tale, full of appearances, of ambiguous seduction, perhaps of looming threat. A simple cup seems pressed by his own shadow as the minutes almost made clothes inconsistent by subtle textures, small sticks colored trigger flames, trees have trunks improbable as thin copper wires precisely Like Melotti, clouds cry like hearts in pain and those English titles mentioned above are influenced by their ironic duality. Although it is true that the glass with its light weight (but also those watercolors so mild, diluted, who seem ready to dissolve – or even to react, see the jellyfish -) could be the stuff of which dreams are made, it is also undeniable its fragility, the precarious existence hanging on the blade of a clumsy gesture or in a capricious wind. As Laura in the admirable drama “The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams, Roberts builts her world of Glass, but unlike that does not indulge in a sterile intimacy and destined to disappointment, but gives vent to her poétic inspiración, apparently infant, happily stimulated by her time, from what surrounds her and involves also to remind us of our fragility, the always possible crushing of our being, as happens to that little mythical unicorn that Laura gave to whom for a moment she believed could be her salvation.
Franco Gordano