INCONTRO CON L'OMBRA
Mario Martinelli reagisce alla svalutazione dell'uomo d'oggi facendogli il monumento all'ombra. Al sentimento di solitudine e di crisi d'identità risponde facendo incontrare la persona con la propria ombra. Gira le città con una installazione che stacca l'ombra dal corpo e la presenta al passante emancipata e intrigante come rivelazione di un altro sé che invita al dialogo. Quindi riveste l'ombra di un tessuto di rete leggero e trasparente che ne prende la forma e la rende visibile per sempre. Non solo immagine ma icona dell'ombra, la rete viene applicata come un graffito plastico sui muri delle città, marcandoli di umano. Le ombre-in rete sono scrigni dell'ombra, icone dell'anima che parlano del meraviglioso mistero dell'esistenza umana.

MEETING THE SHADOW
Mario Martinelli reacts against today’s devaluation of the human kind by making a monument of its shadow. He replies to the commonly shared feeling of loneliness and identity crisis with the introduction of the individual to his/her own shadow. Artist Mario Martinelli tours cities around the globe with an installation which detaches the body’s shadow and presents it emancipated and intriguing to the passer-by as a revelation of another self asking for a dialogue. Then, he covers the shadow with a light and transparent net clothing taking the shape of it and making it forever invisible. Not only image but also shadow icon, the net is then placed on the city walls like plastic graffiti thereby humanizing them. Martinelli’s shadows-in-the-net are shadow chests, soul icons talking about the wonderful mystery of human existence. Such net is mostly made of emptiness and it constitutes a metaphor of the world. Its language hides an unsuspected meaning. In a time of too much of everything and too much noise, by reducing the language to the void, and to silence, Martinelli’s net wants to capture the relic of an unrepeatable moment of the body evaporation, to make an anti-monumental monument to “nothingness”, i.e. the shadow, to that increasingly precarious and devalued and yet amazing thing which is the human kind.