Italic, 2019
Marble, metal structure, and LED
Variable dimensions
Presented at Galeria Carte Scoperte, Milan, 2019
Exhibited at Mint Gallery, London, 2019
Italic is a collection of luminous sculptures born from the radical deconstruction of the alphabet. Gustavo Martini begins with the canonical forms of letters and disassembles them until they are no longer legible—liberated from language, they become autonomous shapes, symbols, and sculptural subjects.
Referencing Ancient Rome—when letters were laboriously carved into marble, their elegance defined by the chisel’s final cut—Martini inverts the tradition. Instead of removing material to reveal words, he constructs the letters themselves as objects, giving physical presence to what was once defined by absence.
Highly graphic and meticulously composed, Italic proposes a new typology—where structure becomes language, and serif-like gestures evoke the history of writing without needing to be read. Martini invites viewers to step outside conventional codes and encounter the architecture of meaning in its most abstract, essential form.
