Marc Travanti

SELECTED WRITINGS & EXCERPTS

 

 

ENTANGLEMENT at Nurture Art, Brooklyn, NY

“A riveting video by Marc Travanti, Entanglement, shows male and female figures twined around each other in ways that evoke tantric sex, wrestling, and the incarnations of Hindu deities, all of which Howard and Regan refer to in their essay. The compositions double themselves enantiomorphically, then linger on the screen, turning abstract and ghostly, before morphing into the next entanglement.” -- Cassandra Netenesch, Art Scene, The Brooklyn Rail, April 2008

“Sex and dance are a kind of yin and yang, with dance as their holy ghost. Marc Travanti's Entanglement best exemplifies this concept, recalling Nataraja, the dancing incarnation of the Hindu god, Shiva the Destroyer. But Kali, goddess of destruction, legendary demon-slayer, dancer, and Shiva's spouse - and also an important figure in Tantric yoga - also comes to mind.” – press release by Kevin Regan and Christopher Howard, Enantiomorphic Chamber at Nurture Art, 2008

 

ONE & ANOTHER

“First one, and then another: When two people meet, the negative space between them serves to activate the relationship, the fundamentally social transaction that takes place there, whether they’re waiting at the same bus stop or standing at the altar in a wedding ceremony. In this series of paintings, Marc Travanti seeks to obliterate the space in between, rendering the encounter of two individuals in bluntly physical terms—a tangled ball of arms and legs, twisted torsos and cascading hair. He depicts these ‘entanglements’ with a tight-edged line that reveals their source in photographs of family and friends who’ve posed in these often ungainly positions. Cast against an indeterminate background, these bodies seem to be falling through the ether with nothing to hold onto but each other. The closed forms and intensely sculptural rendering of these paired, clutching bodies both reduces the individuals to a single, confused corporeal mass and opens them to a broader, existential reading. Created in the uncertain world of post-9/11 America, Travanti’s insistence on the sheer physicality and immediately tangible quality of these paintings can be seen as a call to return to the Real—with all the disquiet and apprehension that such a move entails”. -- Beth Wilson, 2007

 

TRIBE LINE

“This series simultaneously explores both the symbolic and the formal dimensions of iconic imagery, played across the divide between ‘advanced’ Western and ‘primitive’ tribal cultures. Seen against a clear blue sky, populated with swirling white clouds, bar graphs are transformed into a fantastic capitalist landscape: paired with the geometric forms of African tribal art, they draw attention to the surprising visual similarities between these stylized forms. Icons become recognizable through their repetition, a repetition that easily slips into the logic of the fetish, charging the image or the figure with unexpected power. While such a reading is often applied to the African masks that appear in these works, here it unexpectedly calls out the embedded meaning of Wall Street financial graphs, which represent a visualized obsession with the accumulation of wealth—our very own deeply ingrained cultural fetish. The fascination with following the market through these charts invests them with the ultimate symbolic power, rendering them the epitome in acquisitive American culture. Travanti is less interested in the specific political relationship between the First and Third worlds here than he is in creating a situation in which the very notion of signification is placed at cross purposes—and in the process, revealing the continuing power of the image in today’s (post) modern world.” -- Beth Wilson, 2007

 

BUDOFLUX exhibitions, performance and video

“BudoFlux is the elements of the martial arts expressed in performance, visual arts, and other creative activities. The movement was created by Marc Travanti and colleague and choreographer Howard Katz more than 10 years go. Based on the Fluxus art ideas of change, disorder, and movement combined with the Japanese word “budo,” representing the complete field of martial arts, BudoFlux resolves around principles of movement rooted in the martial arts. ‘Dancers focus their energy on different parts of their bodies, but in the martial arts, (karate), most of the movement has to do with focusing energy on one point,’ said Mr. Travanti’.”

…“Men set within the confines of a boxing ring, attempts to define masculinity by questioning the relationship between aggression and submission, honesty and betrayal. A theatrical combination of movement, sound, text and lighting, it records a hybrid of movement: men in suits move from clumsy, haphazard movements to directed, powerful karate attacks; a person wearing boxing gloves combines graceful ballet steps with forceful punching and kicking techniques; tai chi techniques morph into romantic poses. The integration of dance and martial arts is mimicked in the accompanied soundtrack, where live and recorded sounds, featuring rhythms caused by hands and feet punching bags, inhalation and exhalation of breathing, excerpts from interviews and crowd noises are all woven into the track”…

… “One of the photography series, Embrace, depicts various poses of martial arts and dance, attempting to define the difference between attacking and embracing. ‘In the movement of choke-holds, we explore this line between choking and hugging’.”

…“Stance Dance focuses on the production and process of BudoFlux; it explores the poses of the art as well as the stances that evolve from the poses”…

Entanglement (work in progress) is another video production consisting of video, duo-toned photographs, and live performance. Questions of physicality, conflict, and sexuality are addressed as the series works off of movement of nude female and male subject matter. The entangled positions created draw on the movement’s vocabulary of karate and dance and ‘are intended to psychologically challenge and restate traditional notions of conflict.’ The video is a succession of black and white stills that are morphed and dissolved into each other to create ‘transient human sculptures and unexpected, organic abstract images’.” -- Rebecca Plimpton, In the Studio, Nightingale’s Art Faculty, fall, 2002

 

 STRATEGEM at The New Museum, New York, NY

  ...“and Marc Travanti’s perversely playful breathing and utterance-profane fan, Strategem, 1992, stood out from the rest.” – Joshua Decter, Reviews, Artforum, December, 1992

 

INDIVISIBLE at The Merce Cunningham Studio, New York, NY

“Deliberately dim slides of human bodies were projected on hanging panels, and live nude dancers emerged from the shadow of the stage. The opening moments of Indivisible possessed a mysterious beauty.” -- Jack Anderson, The New York Times, Review/Dance, July 2, 1991

 

NEWSPAPER PAINTINGS at the John Davis gallery

 “Marc Travanti shares with the Cubists and Futurists an interest in extending the scope of the picture to accommodate fragments of reality. Using the techniques of collage pioneered by Braque and Picasso, Travanti works with newspaper fragments cut out from various American and foreign periodicals. The fragments are glued to solid rectangular supports, most of which are made of wood. Travanti arranges his material in rhythmical passages, with much attention paid to edge and direction, and to what possible impact the words and letters contained in the pieces of columns and headlines carry. This ground, with its relief construction, provides the artist with the base for building the rest of the composition. In each work, the imagery is a combination of collaged and rendered elements. In "Untitled," 1989, the largest work shown, the lively patterns formed by the newspaper fragments are intensified by vigorously drawn shapes and painted white highlights. For this piece, Travanti asked a number of people to draw parts of the composition, which he then drew and painted over at will. Thus, the artist challenged the autonomy of the work's authorship. In "Vestment," 1989, the idea of the picture as a dynamic field of visual incident is conveyed in striking fashion by the sweeping and swaying movements of lines and panels. The messages sent by this particular field are noticeably ambiguous and open ended. The work has both abstract and associative connotations. The converging passages create an overall rhythmical impression, as well as an illusionistic depth. In "Son," 1989 and "From", 1989, which feature the abstraction of religious signs and symbols (Christ on the cross and the madonna and child, respectively), Travanti demonstrates how content arises from the very body of the surface of the picture. In " Terra Cotta and Bronze," 1989, the focus is on the multiple levels of reality, from the literal to the imitative, that can be accommodated by the picture.” -- Ronny Cohen, Artforum, February 1990

 

“Marc Travanti’s new works weave together the concerns of image and language, intuition and practicality. On a disconcerting field of fragments from both American and foreign language newspapers, Travanti has drawn and pasted fragments of pictorial language: the repetitious forms of drapery falls from Giovanni di Paolo’s paintings, scraps of schematic illustration from science texts, and the almost obsessive reiteration of compositional schemes from traditional artworks, replicated with a studied hand in graphite, broadly drawn directly on the newspaper collage.

The poetic intermingling of these different systems of signification brings a number of questions to light. How many dimensions are there to experience? Can we even begin to number them, once language displaces the present as we traverse time through the intricate process of memory? Travanti’s work literally plays concern for the present, in the cacophonous shards of newsprint, against (and through) the historical, in the alternative language of the image.

The temptation to understand the interpretive action of language by use of a single paradigm – either linguistic or aesthetic – is great, given the quite different ways these types of language function. This new work serves well to remind us, however, that both exist, simultaneously. Individuals, after all, are the ones who read mass-produced newspapers; just as precious, unique works of art are photographed and reproduced for broad consumption in museum catalogs. This transmigration of the individual and the reproducible, the linguistic and the visual, are drawn together in Travanti’s works in a seemingly chaotic web of relationships and meanings that continually resist the simplified mappings of scientific reason.”-- press release by Beth Wilson, John Davis Gallery, 1989

 

PORNOCLASSIC at Jimenez and Algus Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

“Marc Travanti’s photographed collages are pictures assembled from art historical, pornographic and advertising sources. Slightly emblematic in their presentation, these images convey a disturbing elegance.” -- press release by Mitchel Algus, Jimenez and Algus Gallery

 

CONSTRUCTED LABEL PAINTINGS at Stux gallery, New York, NY

“Marc Travanti's new paintings open up the artistic vocabulary of everyday life - that of the myriad boxes and packages that we encounter in the mass-produced marketplace. Travanti's work resists the leveling of meaning inherent in the packaging of consumer society by reasserting the importance of the individual, the unique hand of the artist in the finished work. His sensitive, sculptural use of the encaustic medium literally adds a dimension to the surface gloss normally associated with this subject matter.

Re-contextualizing the formal imagery of a Haagen-Dazs tub or the pattern from a Dixie Cup, with the labeling and the original "content" of the package gone, Travanti focuses on the significance of the images themselves. Form becomes content, and the commodity is transformed into an aesthetic ground, fixed for a moment outside the  dizzying  stream of popular culture." -- press release by Beth Wilson, 1988, Stux Gallery.

 

OF PRIMAL IMPORTANCE: Travanti’s modern artifacts at Colburn Gallery, Burlington, VT

“When walking into Williams Hall Colburn Gallery, one becomes an anthropologist. Not so much a student of ancient cultures or exotic peoples but of the fast-food, high-gloss world with us now. In this sense, the wall pieces of Marc Travanti – showing at the Colburn through today – are modern artifacts.

In his work the New York artist combines primal elements of simple organic shapes with a modern sensibility. He mixes earthen material such as wood, rock, and clay, with objects such as sponges, fur, plastic, and broken beer bottles.

The art that grows from these ingredients is as much primordial as primal: many pieces suggest seals or whales but don’t show enough form for one to be certain. This ambiguity surfaces in Travanti’s masks also. In a variety of shapes and mediums, the masks stare at a viewer like mythic faces. One mask, made of glued wood chips, suggests the type of computer visage depicted in science fiction books.

In his ambiguity and primal simplicity, Travanti creates his own mythology and imbues it with a strong visual imagery and spirit. His pieces remind one of the African masks seen in museums of natural history.

Before becoming museum works, though, these African masks were often used in tribal rituals and carry this import in their carefully crafted faces and large peering eyes. Travanti seems to hold affinities with the primal craftsmen in his ability to give power and mystique to his pieces. Many instill fear and discomfort while inviting one into their dark depths. Just when you feel yourself moving away, though, Travanti pulls you back with his plastic grass or broken beer bottles. The everyday objects give his art a presence and urgency not inherent in the purely primal art of the Africans: the urgency comes with cultural wrapping.

Other than his sea-like creatures and masks, Travanti works with sexual imagery. These images however are tied closely to themes of fertility and organic growth. Travanti combines what looks to be a green pepper, rock, and plastic grass in one of his pieces. Others employ wood and various raw materials. An exception comes with metallic-glazed phallic pieces that Travanti – in keening with his other work – anchors to an organic stone base.

A remarkable aspect of Travanti’s work is his power of illusion. He makes broken glass and stone look malleable as seaweed and concrete as sticky as peanut butter. This ability marks a fine control over his medium. And overall, the stronger works of his exhibition are the broken glass and stone works.

It is interesting to note the timeliness of this primal exhibit. Just as The Museum of Modern Art is being praised for its “Primitivism in 20^th Century Art” exhibit, Travanti brings some of his own up to Burlington. The New York exhibit traces the influence of tribal art on modern artists such as Picasso and Calder. It has been hailed by some critics – according to the New York Times – as a landmark exhibition.

Landmark or not, the importance of the primal influence in 20^th century art – such as Travanti’s - reminds us that while the fashions may change in artistic medium and in our world, the deeper-felt, essential qualities of humankind remain the same.” --John Elmore, The Vermont Cynic, February 28, 1985

 

WALL OBJECTS at P.P.O.W. gallery, New York, NY

“Marc Travanti has invented 3-dimensional wall sculptures that combine slick technological surfaces with natural found materials and has come up with work that seems to link the primitive world with the space age.” – press release by Penny Pikington and Wendy Olsoff, P.P.O.W. 1983

“Real nature would have been too straightforward for Travanti, whose works often seem to be masterpieces of misdirection. But synthetic nature is ideal. Tufts of Astroturf and sprigs of plastic abound in the odd, totemic statues the sculptor produces.” Anthony Shugaar, Attenzione, March 1983