Donald Martiny | Sherna Teperson

The sculpture-like paintings by North Carolina-based artist Donald Martiny present his attempt of freeing the gesture. Monochromatic brushstrokes are entirely taken off the canvas being independent of the traditional rectangular shape of a canvas. Painting without a ground becomes a gesture in itself. The artist himself treats his studio as an arena. In the style of Jackson Pollock, he paints on the floor and walks around the work. The act of painting is almost like a dance. Martiny’s work expresses his physicality recorded in a specific moment in time and place. The gestural brushstrokes are therefore much like his self-portraits. The three-dimensional paintings focus on texture and confront the spectator. They are outwardly directed and demonstrate a dialogue within the architectural space, where they reside. The paintings are exclusively made out of paint and are a perfectly physical representation of a brushstroke. Each of them is one stroke of brush that shows the intention with which it is created. The use of monochrome polymers and dispersed pigment allows Donal Martiny to not be limited by scale, but instead it is his desire to create painting that offer a powerful, unified experience.

In fact, his intent is to emphasize the object as a concrete reality rather than an illusion, by painting in monochrome Martiny avoids creating optical illusions of depth or other illusionistic devices, the color is both mystical and concrete.

Sherna Teperson’s practice could be describe as a poetics of materials. The objects and installations are originated by using materials such as - plastics, cardboard and fluorescent tubes- that invite us to imagine the secret life of matter, including that which constitutes our own bodies. Teperson gets inside her chosen materials, investigating them from within, such is her curiosity to discover possible connections between materials that at first sight are completely unrelated. Looking beyond traditional fine arts material, Teperson’s skills rely on long hours of meditative crafting and are capable of endless reconfigurations. The time invested in these objects is visible and remarkable, Teperson’s works slow us down, inducing us to to feel the materiality of things and the interconnectedness of organic and inorganic matter in enhanced ways. In the new body of work the artist explores the geometry of cell-like sculptures. The way of organizing the works implies similarities between collapse and suspension. She uses bricklayers line and knits the cord onto perspex tubing, to create cellular geometry from these simple objects.

Elsewhere, she mimics nature by filling the gallery floor with clusters of sculptures that resemble branches of trees. Teperson inflects her objects with whimsy, humour and tenderness, balancing formal experimentation with conceptual inquiry, while always grounded in a commitment to sustainability. She provokes thoughts on man-made and natural worlds.