It is the contemporary artist's duty to check and filter the fow of images that make up our daily experience; to evaluate the information confronting us, and to find or invent necessary images rather than multiplying the useless ones we often find ourselves drowning in. Martino Coppes chose to invent his images, to cutivate his own vision without appropriating the prefabricated. His choice of landscape as his subject indicates a willingness to select the image, to initiate a process of interpreting the visible.
Coppes makes his virtual landscapes through a highly refined method of staged photography, constructing small polyethylene structures from the industrial waste products he finds around his studio. After preparing the set, Coppes begins to visually penetrate these structures in search of the images he's after. His is an adaptation based on a process that's both physical and personal : to discover the Great landscape in the microcosm of a plastic model. The photographic result in no way corresponds with the idealization of pace-in the interors of these structures there are shadows and light. The process is one of displacement in which the viewer discovers a new space, one suggesting that condition of inner emptiness arising from the difficulties of being.
This iconographical zeroing reveals the artist's desire to reconstruct the landscape's foundations. The swiftness permitted him by the scale and the iconographical simplicity means that the artist can quickly scan the sets and begin organizing the space. Coppes recounts that during shooting he feels like a tourist, taking one picture after the other. This process establishes an interdependence of the images, a narrative chain in which each link is one example of a general affirmation. In fact, it's no coincidence that he decided to entitle his first video Explorations.
In this space he has chosen to explore, rather than contributing, Coppes cultivates an ecology of the image that reduces the amount of information rather than appropriating or simulating it. The artist has become fond of this process: while still an art academy student, Coppes presented a project for a wall drawing in which the words "ecology" and "economy" intersected one another.
Martino Coppes is executing a clean-up operation that runs parallel to the material he's selected : without forgetting the sculpting process that precedes each shooting session, this artist is not only recycling waste products to create his landscapes, but he's using the same kind of plastic that our shopping bags have been made from in recent years, the ones we have learned not to litter up the landscape with. In other words, Coppes is recycling the significance of other people's trash and in doing so establishing his own poetics. After sculpting his landscapes, Coppes meticulously sets up the lighting and chooses the camera positions-latey his pictures have become more abstract looking, more the suggestion of a landscape rather than its proper photographic description.
But all this doesn't necessarily mean that the viewer ends up seeing a microcosm. The most recent landscapes are on the verge of abstraction: the artist has altered classical perspective while moving the material surface itself into the pictorial forefront. That feeling of freedom of movement we instinctively get in seeing open space is truncated by the suspicion of finding ourselves not within an object but outside a body proffering its curves and its wounds. Each scar is a sealed entrance, healed by time, the trace of an inconclusive action. Each one of his pictures renews this fundamental sense of ambiguity-not knowing if we are inside something or nearby to someone.
Coppes' fascination with his working materials is unusual for a photographer. We only know polyethylene as it appears in finished industrial end products, pressed or poured into the shapes of deck chairs and tables, bumpers and other car parts, plastic bags, and the thousands of other finished products all set to be launched on the global market .The recovery of industrial plastic waste means the beginning of a refining process bent on extracting raw materials from remnants and discards.
Apart from this alchemical transformation of trash to treasure, this work begs the viewer's consideration of the imperfections inherent to an economic reality that dangles zero emissions just out of reach while continually stockpiling its waste. But there is also a poetic process to be considered, one seeking harmony by reinventing the world and its inhabitants. By liberating the space of the usual superstructures, Coppes reclaims the utopia of a livable space.

Gianni Romano





MARTINO COPPES - BIOGRAPHY

1965 Born in Como

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

1997 Galerie Philippe Rizo, Paris
1996 Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milano
1995 Centro d'Arte Contemporanea, Bellinzona
1993 Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milano
Geografia, Viafarni, Milano
1992 L'Aura Arte Contemporanea, Brescia


SELECTED GROUP EXHlBITIONS

1996 Obiettivi soggettivi, Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venizia, (catalogue)
Collective Eye, Musee de l'Eysée, Lausanne (catalogue)
Video-Forum, Art 27'96, Basel
June, c/o Atlantique, Milano, curated by Gianni Romano (video-catalogue)
Home / Salon, Clocktower Gallery, New York

1995-6 Campo, Corderie dell'Arsenae, Venezia, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo,
Torino Konstmuseum, Malmö, curated by Francesco Bonami (catalogue)

1995 Tradition & Innovation: Italian Art since 1945,
National Museum of Contemporary Art,
Seoul, Korea (catalogue)
A quoi jouent-ils ? Les Rencontres, Espace Van Gogh, Arles (catalogue)
Private Welten, Peter Kilchmann Galerie, Zurich,
Modena per la fotografa, Foror Boario, Modena

1994 Transfigurazioni, Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milano (catalogue)
Rien à Signaler, Galerie Analix, Genève (catalogue)
Gli Ultrapiccoli, Galleria Transepoca, Milano