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Opening Reception 6–9 pm
Exhibition Dates | January 24 – March 1st
Martin Golland
Menagerie
Oil on canvas
60 x 48 Inches
Unframed
2024
Martin Golland (b. Montpellier, FR 1975) received his MFA from the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada (2006) and his BFA from Concordia University, Montreal (1998). He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including “Adisokamagan: We All Become Stories” at the Ottawa Art Gallery (2018),“Imaging Disaster” at Museum London, Ontario (2013), and the “11th Annual RBC Painting Competition” at the National Gallery of Canada (2010). His work has been written about in numerous reviews, articles, and publications. His work has been collected into public and private collections across Canada, USA, Germany, and abroad.
Martin Golland’s paintings offer a meeting point between a built environment and the natural world. He seeks to open up a space between living forms and their contexts where painting begins to acquire a life of its own, far from logic, reason, and coherence. Here, the material presence of paint’s sensuality, unruliness, and affective potential overtake the image and its efficacy, embodying forces at the edge of the visible.
Made in his studio in the city, the paintings have become forays back into sense-memory. They attempt to make visible the sensations of kinship, awe, and the indifferent muteness of the natural world, which exists in a place beyond categorization, evaluation or understanding. These are attempts to respond in kind to the vastness of movement, the constancy of change and the embedded cycles of living and dying outside my window.
Image:
Initially, the forms all come from cut-up photographs. Golland works from source materials to respond to a given image rather than paint directly from memory. He moves these photographs around over months or years until they are proximal, fragmented, disproportionate and displaced from a natural order into a space all their own, unlike how a chaotic forest becomes slowly familiar over time, its particularities absorbed into a recognition.
The painting process attempts to reconcile the scattered condition of images through way-finding. He tries to shape from the impartiality of images something that more closely approaches lived experience. Because the space of painting is a domain wherein all is permissible in the mind’s eye, the paintings don’t function as de facto records of experience. Instead, they lay out an optic of assembled scenarios for others to inhabit and move through.
Martin Golland speaks of an insight, borne in solitude, of interconnectedness between all living beings: “These works were made in response to a period of seven years living outside the city on one-and-a-half acres in a rocky outcrop overlooking the Gatineau valley. They are based on an experience of affinity with rock, ground, trees, sky, and all that grows and flies in between.”
Image: Martin Golland, Monstera, Oil on canvas, 60 x 48 Inches, Unframed, 2024
