Hales is overjoyed to announce O happiness! happiness!, Martyn Move‘s debut solo display with the gallery. The exhibition options new artwork that muse on Gustav Flaubert’s seminal e book The Temptation of St Anthony.
Move is essentially a painter engaged with ‘global making.’ The act of portray for him is a method to discover the interior existence and strangeness of the strange. Every paintings starts in fact, with recognizable limbs and parts of panorama, which become into uncanny scenes. Biomorphic landscapes discuss to mythologies, however in Move’s artwork the narratives are knowingly ambiguous. Acquainted and mysterious, quiet and epic, scale and irregularity in percentage puzzles the viewer.
Recognized for artwork which can be intentionally exhausting to put in historical past, there’s a timelessness to Move’s works, paying homage to unearthed artifacts. Artwork are made in contemplative layers; the pigments stay colourful – his utility and beautiful use of color creates works that hum. Sanding and scratching the skin, Move strives to make artwork that experience lived a existence, the hint in their lifestyles obvious. Huge hangings discuss to a heroic narrative of upper powers, offered along small artwork which can be jewel-like and intimate.
Move has lengthy been thinking about depictions of the Temptation of St Anthony all the way through artwork historical past, specifically Hieronymus Bosch’s The Temptation of St Anthony* which is among the extra subdued iterations. Staring at how formulaic the vast majority of depictions are, Move notes a reoccurrence of ‘a wild having a look Tony’ fighting with demons in bodily bureaucracy. Having learn Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony this 12 months, Move was once struck how simply the surrealist imagery was once conjured from the pages. Studying the overall paragraph of Flaubert’s novel Move has likened to discovering his ‘holy grail’ – the phrases completely aligning along with his follow and fostered a want to make extra paintings:
‘O happiness! happiness! I’ve noticed the start of existence, I’ve noticed the start of motion. The blood in my veins is thrashing so exhausting that it is going to burst them. I believe like flying, swimming, yelping, bellowing, howling. I might love to have wings, a carapace, a rind, to respire out smoke, wave my trunk, twist my frame, divide myself up, to be inside of every-thing, to go with the flow away with odours, increase as vegetation do, waft like water, vibrate like sound, gleam like gentle, to curve myself up into each form, to penetrate each and every atom, to get all the way down to the intensity of topic – to be topic!’
For a few years, previous to studying this putting forward paragraph, Move have been growing motifs that imbue the mental and the otherworldly into landscapes. The works within the exhibition take The Temptation of St Anthony as a place to begin – there are not any bodily manifestations of demons however somewhat explorations of concepts that align with Flaubert’s spirit and private passion in topic woven into the tale. The name of the exhibition, O happiness! happiness! immediately quotes Flaubert, offering a wry statement of a sought-after emotion, counterbalancing the darker, extra introspective issues of the artwork. Move states, ‘I believe over those previous couple of years, specifically with lockdown, we’ve got all transform a little Anthony…Locked in ourselves with our demons…’ Billowing clouds, swirling waves, tumbling waterfalls, arching our bodies, all-seeing eyes, outsized pointing hands and blistering suns shape visions of inward mirrored image.