Hervé Martijn - Ounce

Hervé Martijn’s years of experience as a painter drive him to the extremes of his technical ability and question the nature of the true-to-life reality that he as an artist should allow to appear on canvas. Giving shape to a painted reality forces him to make artistic choices each time anew. Martijn’s lifelike translation consists in a painted diversity of reproductive possibilities with an inexhaustible and multipliable creative interpretation of a subtle, emotionally charged reality. His world, consisting mostly of beautiful women, is subtly manipulated on canvas by means of creative reinterpretation. Hervé Martijn’s muses shrink from the viewer’s gaze, or are stripped of their ability to look. A feeling of shame dominates the visible reality of those portrayed. In every painting the face is hidden or averted from the viewer’s judgment. As if the outside world can only observe fragments of a reality that has been made fragile. A visible, emotionally suppressed pain is sublimated in the beautiful reproduction of long, vulnerable suffering. As if recording it on canvas would bear witness to a painted conviction that acceptance is the only way to deal with wounds in life. A way of being marked for life in paint. A merciless “Ounce” upon a time in a fragile reality.

128 pages, 24 x 17 cm, hardcover, MER. Paper Kunsthalle (Ghent).