Fixed explosion
Inspired by the final explosion scene of the famous film Zabriskie Point Inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni's work, Léonard Martin's eponymous suite, presented at the Templon gallery's Brussels space, reveals an upside-down universe evoking the constant flow of images in our world under the cloud's sway. Does this make us want to break free?
Saturation
What sequels can be imagined in this great disorder of signs where automaton-like figures move about (the multimedia artist, who practices painting, sculpture, and video simultaneously, creates puppets and automata intended to stage themes drawn from literature or art history)? Transposing the cloud of levitating objects from Antonioni's film onto the flat surface of the canvas, the Zabriskie Suite inevitably evokes, through the saturation of signs, "This constant flow of images, texts and sounds that now occupy our daily lives and sometimes blur our vision." For Léonard Martin, indeed, “Painting perhaps allows us to make the images fall away, to make this ‘cloud’ that weighs above our heads rain down.”
Recalling, through its plunging perspective, the emaki—those illuminated Chinese, Japanese, or Korean scrolls that foreshadowed cinema—his painting "prevents the gaze from becoming fixed." A fragmented aesthetic that severely tests our perception. There is no rest here; we are in the maelstrom of history and memory. Indeed, the artist asks himself: “How do you piece together the fragments of a story? Where do you look and listen? My paintings don’t provide a definitive answer. They trace lines, from one memory to another, and seek to repopulate this desert over which Antonioni’s lovers fly.”
“Leonard Martin – Zabriskie Suite”
Templon Gallery
Veydtstraat 13A, Brussels (Belgium)
Until February 24, 2024
Belgium – Brussels