EDGAR MARTINS – THE WAYWARD LINE
2012-06-11The photographs of Edgar Martins go beyond the mere image and referent on which they are based. By becoming reflexive and self-critical, they escape the scope of the purely photographic without relinquishing its essence. We can consider them to exist in a hybrid terrain, with affinities not only to painting (apparent in the idea of tableaux and the importance that he grants to composition) but also, to cinema ( plateaux ) and even to sculpture, through the way in which they establish themselves as images-objects. This last characteristic causes them to resemble characters in a quasi-absurd or nonsensical narrative and recalls the ready-mades of the Dadaists and Surrealists. The elements of the bizarre that we discover in these images (in which humans and animals rarely appear) are proof of this theory, helping to establish a sense of distance in the observer, who distrusts what he sees but surrenders to it through a sort of suspension of disbelief (Coleridge) that raises questions in his mind: “Is this a real place or one fabricated by the artist? Could we be immersed in an F for Fake kind of world?”
The theatricality and artificiality of these images, which oscillate between the real and the imaginary, bring them closer to the notion of the fantastic via a certain familiar strangeness that imbues the episode in front of us with suspense . Rather than being random images, chosen according to chance, they stem from a process of conceptual idealization undertaken by the artist, who, like a scientist, makes a prior and careful study of the arrangement of the elements, which are placed in a highly elaborate compositive order.
Opposite – Failure to Launch, 2009
Exhibition runs through till July 11th, 2012
Cristina Guerra Contemporary Art
Rua Santo António à Estrela, 33
Lisbon
Portugal
