My Creative Journey

I need to lose myself in a fantastic form
to find myself again in the completed work.

It does not necessarily have to take a precise form,
but to summarize everything into a new form
that for some reason draws you in…

The work must impose itself, silently…
like love or hate that possesses you without you realizing it,
as if it were magic…

Darkness all around and inside me, the light is about to be born.

October 10, 1974
Natalino Sammartin

Natalino Sammartin was born in April 1942 in Castelgomberto, near Vicenza. He soon moved to Alte di Montecchio Maggiore (Vicenza), where he lives and works.

In his youth, in addition to attending the School of Art and Crafts in Vicenza, he enrolled at the International Academy of Salzburg. In these environments, he learned sculptural and pictorial techniques, acquiring an initial figurative language with a classical imprint, which he progressively developed by increasingly stylizing the figures.

Rosario Assunto, in the monograph “Sammartin (1967-1980),” writes: “[…] Sammartin works like Nature; in the sense that he frees, from the excess of material in which they are imprisoned once the tree has been felled or the block of stone quarried, the possible forms of the material: forms that contain the same rhythm, the same harmony of the trunk and branches, for wood – and for stone, from its consistency, its color, its luminosity. […] His sculpture is not naturalistic, because it does not imitate any semblance of reality found in nature, but it is natural, in the sense that he shapes the material in the same way as Nature shapes it in its formations. Natural sculpture, not naturalistic. And in this natural sculpture, which creates new forms in which the formative process of nature is intentionally and voluntarily prolonged, his sculpture is the foundation of a new reality, not the imitation of a pre-existing one. […]”

Carlo Munari summarizes these early years excellently in the monograph “Sculture di Sammartin” (1975): “[…] Sammartin has progressively disengaged from the figurative simulacrum to rely on the ideal motivations flowing from his fertile creative imagination […]. There are no sudden breaks, abrupt deviations, but rather an evolution of the forms towards a spatial distillation, capable of strengthening their intimate essence. […] Sammartin attacks the block of stone and step by step draws out the work. Alone, without any external help. […] The work will ultimately reveal, in every detail, the emotional involvement of its author: not a cold reproduction of a model, but a warm organism experienced by the artist in its making. […]”

In the mid-1970s, Sammartin’s personal abstract language began to take shape, as Pietro Zampetti explains well in the monograph “Sammartin (1967-1980)”: “[…] in him, nothing is premeditated or planned, but everything emerges and is born from experience. He feels that the stone, that Vicenza stone, is a shell that contains the hidden part of his being. From there his world must emerge, indeed himself as human experience. […] He began, like many others, with images, figures from reality. […] He started again and looked around, because he understood that sculpture is not the imitation of fragile appearances, but the substantial fullness of the self, the participation of consciousness! There is no art without all this. Now begins Sammartin’s Sculpture. […] Starting from the depths, that is, from himself and the formless object, namely the Vicenza stone, that ‘innocent and terrible stone’ that nature offers him, he attacks the block until giving it an appearance, each time a new form that is born from within […]. And so, it is necessary to create, not destroy, to give life to new forms […].”

Enrico Crispolti, in the same monograph, analyzes Sammartin’s artistic path: “[…] In 1967-68, Sammartin was a sculptor in terms of figurative expressionism. […] Afterwards, 1968-69 and ’70, his discourse broadened and became more plastically expansive, although the expressionist option (instinctive rather than cultural) remained. Sammartin uses Vicenza stone to portray human images dramatically eroded (including religious subjects: Deposition, Pietà, etc., 1970), in rhythms of vertical structural cadences, more in a state of falling than erect, while the surfaces are rough and corroded […]

In the intense work of 1974 […] Sammartin resolves his plastic imagination into a completely non-figurative form, pushing every corporeal allusion to a primary organic state […]. Sammartin’s sculptures of 1976 are decidedly three-dimensional, affirming their presence with full physicality, moving from a mental spatiality, a pure spatial design, to an almost object-like, empirical spatiality, within the physical space of human existence, in the everyday. […].

Sammartin’s drawing anticipates and accompanies all his sculptural work. At the beginning of the 1970s, his delineation of human figures in charcoal was sketchy with broad band effects (1971). It otherwise thinned into pure contours to define the flaming movement of ‘silhouette’ images (1971-1972). […] Since 1977, I believe, one encounters the most fascinating sheets, in that continuous exploration of the sign, constructing piece by piece, almost like the chisel or the rasp, layer by layer. But drawing is also the diary of all imaginative temptations, which we find precisely in 1977 in a dramatic clash of forces and different components, which the sign announces through its diversity of writing. […]”.

At the end of the 1980s, when he felt he had fully expressed his inner language, Sammartin decided to move forward, revisiting the figurative style of his early years and merging it with his personal sculptural language. He masterfully inserted the human figure among the abstract forces he had long sought. In the middle of these strong tensions, man returns, more vigorous and expressive, subjected to nature, yet still eager to demonstrate his strength. It is precisely in the 1990s that we find evidence of this further evolution of Sammartin’s sculpture in many works placed both in public and religious spaces.

Starting from the early 2000s, Natalino Sammartin decided to retire from public life. He dedicates every moment of his existence to his sculpture and painting, and even today he continues to develop his artistic journey, tirelessly, never losing the desire to understand more deeply the nature and life around him, always searching for that something which man cannot understand, because man remains small and powerless in the face of the complexity of the universe that overwhelms him.