The Wayward Line
photography by Edgar Martins
20 October – 18 December 2010
51, avenue d’Iéna, 75016 Paris
Landscape, place, space, and architecture have established themselves as the predominant themes in Edgar Martins’ photographic imagery. Martins uses photography to develop a philosophical, quasi-scientific investigation, examining various minimalist concepts of the contemporary urban landscape.A stage for the encounter with the everyday, his work calls to our attention that all is flow, all boundaries are provisional, all space is permeable. It is the setting for spatial and temporal dislocation.
Moving between the factual and fictional, between the concrete and the metaphorical, the artist operates within a landscape of uncertainty, within a culture landscape of permanent flux, transition and opposition. An industrial city, a deserted freeway, a nighttime beach, a runway or an urban border, spaces are primed with a sense of purpose yet they are marginal, fragmented and dispersed.
The work maintains a close and subtle dialogue with the traditions of topography and landscape photography, but we also find evidence of a link to the cinematic, the pictorial, and the sculptural. However, Edgar Martins’ photography remains unique in its psychological nuances. These genres are subjected to an approach that is simultaneously descriptive, speculative, and reconfiguring, lying as it does between the documentation of spaces and objects that are suggestive and paradigmatic in social and visual terms, and the assumption of the image as a privileged form of aesthetic and artistic contemplation and (re)appreciation..
Edgar Martins at the Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre in Paris: This is Martins’ first individual show in France and his largest exhibition to date. Images from seven series have been selected, all of which were produced over the last four years, including an unpublished body of work created in 2010:
A Metaphysical Survey of British Dwellings (2010), Reluctant Monoliths (2009), The Rate of Convergence of Two Opposing System Trajectories (2008/09), When Light Casts no Shadow (2008), This is Not a House (2008), Dwarf Exoplanets & Other Sophisms (2007) and The Accidental Theorist (2006/08).
The artist Edgar Martins was born in Portugal in 1977 and grew up in Macau. He has been based for many years in London, where he undertook his academic training and established his artistic career. He is currently one of the most distinguished and prolific Portuguese photographers, having gained an enormous amount of recognition from both the public and institutions in Portugal and abroad. Besides having won various awards, his work is represented in several public and private collections. www.edgarmartins.com
Curator Sergio Mah
Catalogue In the context of this exhibition an anthology of Edgar Martins’ oeuvre will be produced.
Calouste Gulbenkian Cultural Centre
51, avenue d’Iéna, 75016 Paris
Ph: +33 (0) 1 53 23 93 93
Monday to Friday 9 am to 5:30 pm
Saturday 1 pm to 6 pm
Press contact: jasmin.uhlig@gulbenkian-paris.org, 01 53 23 93 78
