Exhibition: 4th October to 17th November 2012
“Places die like men, although they appear to subsist.”
-Joseph Joubert
Maddox Arts is delighted to announce the latest exhibition of works by painter Cipriano Martinez. Destructive Testing forms a compilation of his most recent work, a manifestation of his latest tropes alongside his abiding interest in the urban landscape and a honing of his ubiquitous style.
Martinez’s style has arrived at a point reminiscent of the ‘harmonious contradictions’ described in Damian Bayon’s ‘La construcción de lo visual’. Such contradictions reverberate to the core of Martínez’s work but can be seen most literally in the work’s ambiguous relation to the act of pictorial representation. The urge to describe actual topographies and the minutia of the urban landscape is tempted by a desire to plunge into realms of unbridled abstraction; the resulting juncture a place where reality and the phenomenological subjectivity of perception is unified. The metaphor of ‘contradiction’ is further subverted when we consider the contradictions implicit in the 21st century’s idea of the metropolis- as a place where opportunity and hopelessness, abundant wealth and crushing poverty exist side-by-side in a harmony that seems to constantly teeter on the brink of chaos.
The role of chaos, as a Cartesian counterweight to Le Corbusier’s utopian vision plays a vital role in these paintings and can be glimpsed in the multifarious jutting shards, cavernous voids and dislocations constantly threatening the linearity of vectored forms. Through swathes of canvas, the cities skeleton, perceptible in its perfection, is rendered alongside the mutated descendant of its current form, its dichotomies framed as a one; its contradictions suspended in harmony.
