Jorge Martins (Lisbon, 1940) is what is usually called a solitary artist, respected by colleagues from different generations. His work, poetic and essentially abstract, is in dialogue with the best of European and American drawing of the 20th century . His tireless research into drawing has contributed to this prestige and the validity of his work, right from his first exhibitions. In fact, it was with his drawings that he arrived at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris at the end of the 1970s, where an individual painting was dedicated to him. A careful selection of his drawings —along with his notebooks, which were shown for the first time— made up the exhibition proposal for MARCO.
The curator, Óscar Antonio Molina , during the opening of said exhibition, pointed out that "the exhibition focuses on that part of his abundant production, where the richness of registers is the predominant note: from geometry to expressive gesture; from mathematical order to verbal statement in the form of writing, letters or annotations, from the silhouette to the stain, from figuration to monochrome... For the MARCO exhibition we have opted for a wide selection of works on paper and workbooks, from all production dates of the artist, avoiding from the beginning the conventional idea of retrospective, and rejecting the chronological organization of what is exhibited, or anything that leads to creating the impression of a false linear development in such a long trajectory".
Shadows and Paradoxes proposes to weave various axes of reading on his drawing, which complete and update the abundant critical fortune received by the artist throughout his career. It is necessary to underline as one of the most remarkable characteristics in the work of Martins, his amazing ability to stage, within the limits of the paper, symbolic, spiritual and metaphysical dimensions practically unmanageable outside the plane of the image. The title of the exhibition, suggested by the artist himself, points to this somewhat unfathomable dimension of art from its nuclear stage: drawing .
Individual catalog, 2018.
Texts: Óscar Alonso Molina.
Language: Spanish, Portuguese and English.
Pages: 304
Binding: Hardcover
Format: 17.5 x 24 cm
