JUMBLE

Mankind has developed a particular tendency to produce “things”, amongst which we must also include the tools used for making them. Martina Brugnara is faithful to the words of George Kubler: “Art history is also included in the history of things. Works of art, even more than tools, represent a symbolic communications system” which, in the case of this artist, serves as a connective tissue between the han- dywoman herself and the aesthetic quotient of each individual tool. Martina Brugnara’s tools are as fascinating as they are enigmatic, because their practical use, whether real of illusory, is subordinate to a purely visual use.
Through a combinatory process, Brugnara relieves the objects of their past life and redeems them, not only from wear and rust, but by converting their utilitarian nature into a semiotic need that becomes the intersection/adhesive between the mechanical arts and the li- beral arts. Like the machines exhibited in some of the universal expositions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Brugnara’s works could well be a part of the genre of machines célibataires for the very reason that they are outside the productive system. If we wish to find a comparison we might find one in the function of stators, which are directly connected to balance (at the end of the day, the traditional concept of “composition” imposes itself). Even though they are abandoned appliances, they do not renounce their subversive load: they are tentacular structures on the extensions of which are fixed sickles, billhooks, files, saws, pincers, axes, spatulas, hammers, pliers and other tools that might threaten the safety of the public.
Such accumulations could be considered as an arsenal, given that bellus and bellem have the same etymological root. This is an aspect that, in this specific case, we must refer back to Karl Elsener who supplied his country’s army with the Swiss army knife which, over the years, was to become an emblem of functionality and efficiency. Following in the footsteps of this idea, Brugnara has associated each work with the name of someone from the Elsener dynasty, a name which by now is associated with the invention and/or proliferation of Swiss knives (a tool that by now we could consider a shining example of the assemblages that modern and contemporary art has habituated us to).
Given that Samuel Butler said that “The body is but a pair of pincers set over a bellows and a stewpan, and the whole fixed upon stilts”, it is not out of place to note a parallel between Brugnara’s work and portraiture. But, rather than trusting in conventional models, one that attempts to find a likeness with the subject, she reduces anatomy to objects that are cleverly linked together. As is obvious, these assemblages are not intended to represent people in a strict sense but, rather, aim to establish or reconstruct a family of works that earlier I defined as machines but which, on a closer look, are nothing other than traps to capture our curiosity. Given that curiosité was a term used in the eighteenth century for the applied arts, Martina Brugnara does not passively echo the original use of these things that she utilises but, rather, she is concerned with transforming them into res singulares that can produce amazement, seduction, and discomfiture.

#AlbertoZanchetta
(director of Museo di Lissone)