Fixed explosion
Inspired by the final explosion scene in Michelangelo Antonioni's famous film Zabriskie Point, Léonard Martin's homonymous suite at Galerie Templon in Brussels presents a world turned upside down, evoking the constant flow of images in our world under the grip of the cloud. Enough to make us want to break free?
Saturation
What could be next in this great disorder of signs and automaton-like figures (the multimedia artist, who works with painting, sculpture and video, creates puppets and automatons to stage themes from literature and art history)? Transposing the cloud of levitating objects in Antonioni's film onto the flat surface of the canvas, Suite Zabriskie inevitably evokes, through the saturation of signs, "the constant flow of images, texts and sounds that now occupy our daily lives and sometimes blur our vision". For Léonard Martin, in fact, "painting perhaps allows images to fall, to rain down this 'cloud' that hangs over our heads".
With its plunging perspective reminiscent of emaki - the Chinese, Japanese or Korean illuminated scrolls that prefigured cinema - his painting "prevents the eye from freezing". A fragmented aesthetic that puts our gaze to the test. There's no rest here; we're in the whirlwind of history and memory. Indeed, the artist asks: "How can we put the pieces of history back together? Where should we look and listen? My paintings don't take stock. They draw lines from one memory to another, seeking to repopulate the desert over which Antonioni's lovers fly.
"Léonard Martin - Suite Zabriskie
Templon Gallery
Veydtstraat 13A, Brussels (Belgium)
Until February 24, 2024
Belgium - Brussels