Jonathan Martin is developing a prolific and diverse body of work featuring drawings, assemblages and films. Recomposing systems formed of echoes, migrations, tensions and interactions between esthetic and cultural motifs that are at times quite unrelated, Jonathan Martin views art as a poetics of passage where permutations and displacements offer the possibility of a new narrative. In Rose Film (2014), a sequence shot focusing on a hand telling beads, the artist develops a metaphorical and metapoetical reflection on film images and their succession. In War Whoop (2012), Jonathan Martin is less concerned with exploring this succession and focuses instead on highlighting the migration process of secular motifs in a contemporary work.
In his drawing Blake Dante Sun Ra (2011), he apposes proper names and a frieze with symbols associated with esotericism, correlating how the musician Sun Ra (1914 – 1993) referred to the sun god of Egyptian mythology, Ra, in order to create the eclectic foundations of Afrofuturism and the way in which William Blake (1757 – 1827)— painter, engraver and poet—illustrated Dante’s Divine Comedy composed in the fourteenth-century. This drawing openly expresses Jonathan Martin’s interest in recomposing motifs and contents in the creation of new forms and meanings.

Curator: Julien Fronsacq

Jonathan Martin is an artist-in-residence of Pavillon Neuflize OBC.

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