Into the Waiting Air

Opening Reception January 24, 2025

Exhibition Dates | January 24 - March 1, 2025

Martin Golland’s paintings explore the intersection between the built environment and the natural world. His work seeks to carve out a space where living forms and their contexts intermingle, allowing painting to take on a life untethered from logic, reason, and coherence. In this space, the material presence of paint—its sensuality, unruliness, and affective potential—supersedes the image and its representational function, embodying forces that exist on the edge of visibility.

While Golland’s recent work begins with representation, it evolves through an accumulation of selected fragments, collaged juxtapositions, and unresolved contrasts that challenge its initial assumptions. His paintings destabilize dualities such as chaos and order, surface and substance, the natural and the imagined. These elements coalesce into an interior geography, unfolding in dynamic interrelationships as the contexts of their materialization remain fluid and unfixed.

Golland’s open-ended, non-linear approach to painting resists adherence to naturalism or the reduction of the world to elemental essences. Neither landscapes nor pure abstractions, his works construct an imaginary space shaped by recollection and dream, anticipation and loss, nostalgia and forgetfulness. This space remains open to the unknowable, inviting viewers to navigate its complexities and ambiguities.

Biography

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.