“Shiftings, displacings . . . sets of membranes, one inside the other, dense bodies, soft, thin, rigid.” Nicola Martini’s recent artist statement evokes an undeniable corporality, though no figures occur overtly in his work. The Italian sculptor is thus both naming the specter that hovers above his abstract practice (and those of so many of his contemporaries) and personifying his works so that the inanimate materials he uses—tangible sheets of sandstone and wax, among them—suddenly take on human attributes. After all, there is a certain ambiguity to adjectives such as soft, thin, and