Urban Aesthetic  Realism balanced between Expressionist Informal Painting and Calligraphic Sign.  

 By Lodovico Minelli

“Ghetto Landscapes” by Rae Martini is a pictorial set that testifies the artist’s permanent search of an aesthetic realism connected to places, passed through or lived, scattered in the great contemporary metropolis.
Visual micro cosmos, packed with stories and suggestions, victims of a careless society, loosing itself daily in the global frenzy.
Martini’s aesthetic sense primarily manifests itself in the exercise of his own visual sensibility. Rae discovers, on worn urban surfaces, the intimate tumult of his own interiority.
The photography is mostly a tool for understanding, offered as a pure emotional matrix to frame his own personal sensitiveness in the organization of a defined space and an instant. Therefore photography becomes the tool to get to painting. The Artist visualizes reality, re-elaborates it through an emotional, direct and realistic shot. What remains is the alchemical or electronic regeneration of the place, the surfaces, the lights, the tones, the materials, the disruptive power of a snapshot. Photography is to Rae both an emotional matrix and an aesthetic source: the act of transporting it into painting is the frequency on which the matrix transmits emotions and feelings, the artwork becomes both a receiver and a guardian of the impulsive auteur richness. The painting reinterprets, synthesises, alters reality through the Painter’s poetic and experiential filters.
Martini produces live art, able to represent the customs, the ideas, the look of his era, he does it through his own point of view, for the joy of Gustave Coubet, who was the first to declare in public his intentions in the unlucky occasion of the Pavillon diu Réalisme. Rae Martini raises his comparison with the public dimension, in a direct, shameless way, offering us precious and secret emotions which have lived in nocturnal silences, interrupted by sirens from time to time.
The search of urban aesthetic realism manifests in Martini through the application of informal painting of expressionist matrix. The expressive strength of this pictorial style  allows the artist to privilege, through exasperation, the emotional data of reality, compared to the one objectively perceivable on the photographic device.
In his  total matter approach, typical of abstract expressionism, Rae skilfully gives vent to the mental images of his experiences, energetically applying them through rhythms and delicious forms. Martini’s informal art of matter stands out for the concrete painting, the strong gestured expressiveness, determinately democratic. The materials used are taken from the urban landscape depicted: synthetic paint, enamels, tars, incorporated with excellence and transformed with remarkable passion. Martini’s Painting vividly lives again on canvas along with the passions, the shocks and the shivers which were once flowing on the City’s surface. When shot, photography defines just one moment, while the art of painting continues to transform reality letting the instinct, the rhythm, the aesthetic, seeds which are already contained in the image, finally bloom; the travel of an artwork is eternal, it continues till the end of time.
While giving a vital outlet to his emotionality, Rae introduces a major change: the insertion of the sign, the shape into the Work of Art. The shape manifests through calligraphic signs that belong to the extremely personal urban writing code that street artists have studied, practiced and given life to during his twenty-years personal experience of street activism. The emotional expressionist outburst intertwines at this level with signs, shapes, careful chosen colours, force vectors, as a result of a intentional and maniacal quest for perfection.  The strength expressed by lines in styles and tags, throw-ups or wildstyles, make the Artworks extremely powerfull and overwhelmingly up-to-date aesthetically. Despite the formal contrasts created by the Artist, life and shape combine thanks to elegant similarities of subversive elements in both fields of application.
Rae Martini’s methodical, self- taught approach traces an impressive parallelism with Gilles Deleuze’s  philosophic analysis in the essay “ The Logic of Sensation”, dedicated to Francis Bacon’s behaviour. The pictorial-creative process the philosophical Deleuzian criticism outlines, reflects the sequence of four elements in Kant’s analysis, developed in the Criticism of  Judgment: The Aesthetic Understanding, The Rhythm, the Chaos as an approach to Sublime, the Strength.
Rae Martini, extremely coherently, exercises his passionate and aesthetic strength on the city’s skin. A skin which is more and more reinterpreted and filtered through his emotions. A thin derma made of biological architecture, on which elements such as wear, dirt, signs of time are nothing more than a beautiful frame, devoted to the celebration of values of purity, independence and intellectual elevation in a balanced equilibrium, heavily influenced by oriental philosophy.