Martí Cormand

The gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Marti Cormand. It consists of four oil on canvas paintings and two works on paper. The paintings document the clash between two superficies: reality and hypo-reality. The exhibition is a close-up on six contemporary landscapes with blemishes, a testimony to the degradation of certainty.

Marti Cormand operates within the systems of traditional landscape and abstraction to bring painting to an articulate point of self-consciousness. Qualities of transparency, density, light, shadows and extreme precision in the manner of the Dutch School of Painting are juxtaposed with references to the technologies of image reproduction. His work constantly reminds us that painting is a theater of manipulated information.

The paintings in the exhibition introduce a world in which the artificial infiltrates the natural. Candy-colored shapes resembling books, shipping containers, and otherworldly monoliths morph into unfamiliar puddles and geometric abstractions as they become scars upon the forest and industrial wastelands in which they proliferate. The foreign structures follow the rhythm of the landscapes, corrupting and transforming them. The anonymous modules evoke science fiction architecture, cellular configurations and offer a concentration of information without the possibility to access it.

In a singular and new form, Marti Cormand reveals the internal structures hidden in the apparent order of a conventional landscape. In the tangible world we inhabit, the safety of things often overcomes individual liberties, while in the anonymous, digital world risk, anarchy and imagination flourish. In Marti Cormand’s paintings, those two levels of perception, the analog and the digital, are clashing on canvas.

Marti Cormand invents a form of hypo-realism where a hidden abstract world rendered visible infiltrates and disintegrates its realistic version. Listening to a song very closely, one can hear the dialogue between the zeros and the ones of digital language. Any portion of reality once encoded becomes hypo-realistic. Looking at one of Marti Cormand’s paintings allows one to simultaneously watch a naturalistic landscape and its version (or sub-version) rendered in bytes.

Marti Cormand was born in Spain in 1970. He received his MFA at the University of Barcelona. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. This is his second solo show in New York.