Wednesday, November 14, 2012

An artist who digs deep into mysteries of life

Primarily known for his sculpting skills, George Martin P.J. has painted several beautiful canvasses that dig deep into the solved and unsolved mysteries of life. His densely populated paintings resonate with the transitory and disunited true nature of our world. They enact the enigmatic drama of contemporary life. His luridly colored sculptures and canvases are dotted with scenes from dense urban spaces – ubiquitous yet unfamiliar to us, at times.

Working with a wide range of materials, he looks to build serene and vivacious visual harmony. The images or forms - quotidian in nature – construe each work that represents the complexities of urban life. The artist ably captures the outer layers of urban spaces, which reflect the postmodern sense of reality.

These postmodern architectural structures dispel the sense of unity from a closer distance though they show transparency and a feeling of progress, scientific achievement etc from a considerable distance. The enigma of the human drama begins where the sense of reality is displaced or destabilized from its own immediate surroundings.

New Delhi based Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre had presented a show, entitled ‘Surviving Sagas’ in 2010 courtesy Ashna. A gallery note on George Martin mentioned: “The artist approaches the world is capable of discriminating people as per religion, caste, creed, fashion, language and so on from a pointed perspective. However, his engagement with the outer world of reality does not happen through the portraiture of people as they are or as they caught in certain symbolic situations.

“On the contrary, he looks the world around him through a filter of unreality, which could split, and dismember the palpable reality into pieces where the represented ones become patterns and they demand viewers’ complete devotion for cohesive reading. He has always been interested in tracing the political, cultural and existential structures that are operational in our society, secretly and overtly exercising power on people. In his artistic world, which in all sense is a coagulation of several micro worlds, exists people, animals, architecture, vehicles and urban streets as phantoms that detach themselves from the reality.”

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