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Indepth Arts News:
"Liquid: Patrick Martinez"
2003-11-28 until 2003-12-22
Parker's Box
Williamsburg, NY,
USA United States of America
In the environment that Martinez has created for his exhibition at Parker's Box, the New York based artist sets out to animate the gallery with works that blur preconceived notions of process and finished product. Paint becomes sculpture becomes installation becomes video…and ambiguous substances permeate the space, seeping through the very floorboards of the gallery. This is a world that links into reality as much as into science fiction, to outer space as much as to tabletop microcosms as in Martinez's film Liquid World, a homemade epic, with hand crafted special effects, and cosmic vibrations.
Patrick Martinez is an artist of great diversity, working variously with innovative film techniques, objects, machines, drawings etc. as a means to fulfill an endless flow of ideas. One area of practice forefronted at Parker's Box, clearly deals with notions of “matter”and both its ongoing value to the artist, and its frequent instability and impermanence. The gallery finds itself infiltrated by substances that may be under the artist's control, or not, nudging Martinez towards a status as a kind of “neo-existentialist.” At the same time, his efforts to harness matter as sculpture/installation/art, are paralleled by the complementary exploration of art (and perhaps life?), as stuff in a wider context . . . Examples of the latter are Untitled (After The Visible Human Project) Martinez's video reconstruction of two humans (male and female), realized from the existing National Library of Medicine archives of lateral laser slices of two entire human bodies. (This film is to be shown at a special screening at the gallery on November 21, as a preview to this show. It can also be seen during the show by appointment, or at The Center for Photography at Woodstock - see below * ). Exploring the matter we are made of in a similar way, his Alien figure, a blob-like sculpture standing in front of a distorting mirror contemplates its own reflection which gives it back some semblance of normalcy - whatever that might be.
Patrick Martinez was born in Besançon, France in 1969 and has exhibited in Europe, where he is represented by Galerie Vallois in Paris and in Japan and the USA.
* Untitled (After The Visible Human Project) can also be viewed until December 21 at The Center for Photography at Woodstock, where it is part of the exhibition Divining Fragments: Reconciling the Body curated by Koan-Jeff Baysa.
Liquid by Patrick Martinez has been made possible with support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in New York, The Association Française d’Action Artistique (AFAA) and Golden Artist Colors, and is part of a Patrick Martinez project in collaboration with Le Pavé dans La Mare, Besançon, France.
With special thanks to: The National Library of Medicine, Päivi Björkenheim, Angela Garcia, Jason Lang, Thierry Millotte, Eve Laroche-Joubert, Tim Laun, Frederic Yvelin, and Tim and Nancy Grumbacher.
IMAGE
Patrick Martinez
still from video "Exercise (Boxing)", 1998
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