Josée Bienvenu Gallery is pleased to present Inbox, an exhibition of new works by Marti Cormand. Inbox portrays the foreign and astonishing fact of a residual and discomposed world. A testimony to the degradation of certainty and to the emergence of a more hopeful era, the exhibition proposes a container as a content where there is no subordination between reality and its representation.

In the past year, Americans have used 49 billion cardboard boxes to ship 95% of their manufactured goods. A forest of corrugated cardboard is used every day to ship fast around the world and it is discarded even faster without anyone paying attention. During one year, Marti Cormand has devoted all his attention to the six faces of a single flattened cardboard box, rescued from an anonymous bundle piled on the sidewalk of his Dumbo studio, the Brooklyn neighborhood known as the birthplace of corrugated cardboard.

The artist has focused an incredible level of precision to replicate every element of a particular box, on an identical flattened box, built of acid-free cardboard, painted to look like naked corrugated cardboard. The resulting replica and the subsequent fragments bear every element of the box’s biography: cuts, marks, folds, footprints, leftover stickers and labels, staples, fragments of tape, ripped corner and sides. The fast gesture of a quick notation made with a marker on the box, or the trace of a footstep are meticulously rendered with the slowness inherent to painting with oil. Qualities of transparency, density, light, shadows and extreme precision in the manner of the Dutch School of Painting are applied to bring the work to an articulate point of self-consciousness: Marti Cormand’s landscapes of cardboard constantly remind us that art is a theater of manipulated information.

Born in Spain in 1971, Marti Cormand lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.  Selected exhibitions include: Portland Museum of Art, OR (Oct 2010-Jan 2011); Arranz-Bravo Foundation,  Hospitalet de LLobregat, Barcelona, Spain  (2010); Galerie Lelong, New York (2010); LewAllen Projects, Sante Fe, NM (2010); Josée Bienvenu Gallery, New York (2009, 2007); Aldrich 2007 Emerging Artist Award Exhibition, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Villa Arson, Nice, France (2008). His work is included in several collections such as The Museum of Modern Art (New York), Fundacio La Caixa (Barcelona, Spain), Progressive Corporation (Mayfield Village, OH), Fundacio Villa (Barcelona, Spain), Caja Madrid (Spain).