EXHIBITIONS: Marti Cormand - Undercut
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Marti Cormand–Undercut
4 May – 10 June 2006
Reception: Thursday, 4 May, 5:30-7:30 PM
Gallery Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10:30-5:30 PM
Email: info@gregorylindgallery.com
In the oil works of New York-based painter Marti Cormand, nature and artificiality share an amorous and inextricable embrace. Cormand's traditional landscapes bring to mind the Dutch School's hyperrealistic attention to light and shadow, but his realism is undercut by loose clusters of abstraction that lie camouflaged in pastoral settings. Cormand's shapes and monoliths bring to mind the technology of image reproduction, their slick and pliable surfaces suggesting the synthetic quality of digital architecture.
Against the intentionally banal backdrops of land, Cormand's amorphous pastel blobs and cylinders deliquesce into puddles, knots and whorls, and other intricate shapes. Blurred backdrops loom behind stark, geometrically flat foregrounds -- while industrial wastelands strewn with digital objets d'art vie with rustic settings such as forests and rivers. The foreign marks move to the rhythm of the landscapes, however, and mimic the natural shapes against which they are juxtaposed: vertically oriented bars nestle among tree trunks; irregular disks bob along stony brooks; and arcs blend with branches.
However subtle and diffuse the placement of the artificial objects, their influence both contaminates and transforms Cormand's sylvan landscapes. The works can also be seen as dialogues with other artists' landscapes; for example, "Undercutting Adams" intersperses Ansel Adams photographs with intense color notes that weave a secondary narrative into predictable images. As colorful cubes and planes bisect unextraordinary foliage and puddles of water in Cormand's work, conventional landscapes become subject to the anarchic logic of the digital realm.
Cormand's uncanny monoliths and otherworldy baubles coalesce to form a mysterious codex -- filling his canvases with dense and impermeable information. The pieces can be seen as a commentary on technology infiltrating the most idyllic spaces, and themes of industrial decay and digital fantasy abound in the work as well. However, there is no discontinuity in the images, as they are meant to delicately disorient rather than shock the eye. As critics have noted, Cormand's placement of a hidden abstract world alongside its visible corollary disintegrates the viewer's notion of realism versus artificiality. Looking at these paintings allows one to simultaneously linger upon a naturalistic landscape and its version rendered in bytes.
Marti Cormand was born in Spain in 1970. His recent exhibitions include the Josee Bienvenu Gallery, New York, NY, 2005; and the Centro de Arte, Madrid, Spain, 2004. Cormand was also a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He received his MFA at the University of Barcelona, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.