Stephen Haller Gallery hosts Lloyd Martin's "Tracts"

Sunday, 16 September 2007 09:03

New York City - Stephen Haller Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by American artist Lloyd Martin. The exhibition, entitled Tracts, consists of paintings from his most recent body of work. On exhibition through October 13 ^TH, 2007.

Lloyd Martin’s imagery is stunningly simple, pared down to a rhythmic symmetry of his own devising, embodying what art critic Maureen Mullarkey described as a “seductive minimalism, one that retains some whisper of lived experience.”

The title, Tracts, suggests a stretch of space or time. And it is the transformative nature of time and use, the decay as well as revitalization of the urban landscape around the artist’s studio that provide the primary inspiration for his austere yet painterly body of work. It is as if the geometry of his forms attempts to hold time itself - its nuances, alterations, change; and it is the tension between such disparate elements that gives the work its dynamism.

In the catalogue essay for a Martin exhibition in Taiwan, Wang Pin-Hua wrote: “with these frame-like lines, Martin creates a seemingly wider structure or multi-layered space by dividing and reconstructing the images, making the paintings extend far beyond the boundaries of the pictures.”

The artist keeps photographic journals with images revealing synthetic rhythms such as the serrations found in ventilation or heating units, or alterations of architectural situations. He writes of his work “these compositions have been derived from observations of architectural incidences.” Yet he has also noted “the influence of Indian tantric painting and the kinds of logics displayed in those miniature meditative structures”.

Curator Lisa Russell wrote: “Lloyd Martin’s reductive abstractions speak to the essential nature of painting and form…The interplay of elements is like echoes that resonate and leave one with a feeling of suspended time. Contemplative in nature, these eloquent paintings act as meditations, eliciting both visceral and cerebral responses.”

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