The gallery is pleased to present Offside, an exhibition of new paintings by Marti Cormand. A testimony to the degradation of certainty, the exhibition is a close-up view on six blemished contemporary landscapes.

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 digital technologies of image reproduction. His work introduces a world in which the artificial infiltrates the natural.

The world changes in an efficient yet chaotic manner: an unpredictable chain of mutations in architecture, technology, climate, fauna and flora. It is a clash of contradictions in which the intolerable becomes daily routine; opposite poles turn into neighbors in a residual and discomposed word. This foreign and astonishing reality makes us feel like strangers in our own country, in our own body. Displaced and exposed “offside”, we try to naturalize the artificial: we swim in the air.

Marti Cormand invents a form of hypo-realism where a hidden abstract world rendered visible infiltrates and disintegrates its realistic version. The six new paintings on view document inconvenient migrations and relationships that can only emerge from odd encounters in a dumpster.

Candy-colored shapes resembling books, shipping containers and otherworldly monoliths creep into the immensity of an iceberg or into a rock formation in a tropical forest. The foreign structures follow the rhythm of the landscapes, corrupting and transforming them. The anonymous modules evoke science fiction architecture or cellular configurations. They offer a concentration of information that cannot be accessed.

Marti Cormand was born in Spain in 1971. He received his MFA at the University of Barcelona. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.