Volo Dantesco

Gallery70 is proud to present  the marvelous  Volo Dantesco by  Martin Stommel  - with light and dark, movement and standing, objectivity and abstraction, the artist transforms what is said and recognized in Dante's verses, reshapes it, giving to this  painting  an extraordinary inner strength.

"Volo dantesco" is a painting fully based on a literary source. I think what drove me generally in this working scheme was the wish to give a radical counterpoint at the somehow paradox situation of contemporary art, that is it's other form of dependency. Whilst the trend demanded a most possible individual standpoint regarding invention and aspect, it threw the work itself, the process of painting and composing, in very conditioned channels. Painting couldn't achieve to be a free flow of performance, as it had to constantly consider the bondage of
incomparability. Let me explain this by a simple comparison. Imagine a young man that wants to kiss a woman, knowing that women had been kissed always and ever. If he's bound to the idea, that his kiss should have the most individual, matchless form of all, he will consider a lot. There would be little place left to live his feelings. Whereas, if he trusts his feelings and even tries to follow a pattern, nature
will find it's way - also his individual nature. Let's stay with this example, with the kiss, for my painting. Actually there's kisses that mean exactly the situation of Dante, when on his way through heaven, side by side with Beatrice, he was looking back to earth. He saw the little planet surrounded by influences and powers and needs, it's neighbour planets, entangled, like in chains. But he was far up, as he joined the love he felt, that led him." Martin Stommel 
"[...] anyone who takes a closer look at Stommel's depictions will also notice an intensity of feeling that also allows the religious aspect of the Commedia, the space between life and death, this world and the afterlife, fear, hope, faith and love, to be sensed in many places... " says Dr Thomas Brueckner
Member of the Board of Directors of the German Dante Society  while analyzing the series of illustrations on Divine Comedy published by Martin Stommel  in 2000