John Martini's studio in Key West, Florida, that singular, surprising American city, is an old movie theater, a fitting birth place for his larger-than-life, enigmatically iconic figures. And one of the delights of Key West is to come upon his work in the gardens, salons and watering holes there. I think of Martini's work as being sly in the most wholesome, enchanting sense. It is not merely a clever stratagem that his marvelous creations are so antithetically sculptural. Why be round when so much pleasure, so much fulfillment can be had in being flat?
His creatures are not poised to enter our common, three dimensional world, they inhabit another time, or timelessness, which time slyly is; they inhabit another dimension of becoming, a very stasis of becoming. The work is all straight-forward contradiction. His steel is lithe. His silhouettes have soul. There is a sense of bemused energy, an innocence that knowledge can only instruct in further innocence. His lean ladies and whizzy-haired gents, his hermetically self-contained, or startled, or benignly heraldic animals are heroically proportioned but shy, if not, indeed, flabbergasted, to find themselves present among us.
They are like Rilkean emissaries from some other, fresh, place. And they refresh us, how grateful we are.