Gene Paul Martin’s ‘spiritual thug lyf’

SILVERLENS Galleries presents a solo exhibition by Gene Paul Martin, titled spiritual thug lyf, a mesmerizing painting tour de force collapsing boundaries of abstraction, figuration, and landscape genres into a phantasmic panorama of shifting contexts and mutable identities that represent states of transcendental awareness born of aesthetic freedom.

Mixing the infinite data looms of digital culture and its assembly machines with the mystical intuitiveness of traditional media, Martin explores visual code switching into symbolic narratives, crossing the harmonic shuffle between artistic negation and rhythmical desire to deliver the birth of spiritual visions toward ecstatic experiences, while pitching the artist at the center of experiments in alchemical transformation and self-realization. The painter who uses his imagination as the sole essential force in creating the universe.

The goal of painting here is to introduce the extraordinary in the fleeting moment of creation possible within the confines of two dimensional space that also sets the tone for the artist’s fabrication of the illusion of reality and the experience of magic. Indeed, Martin’s approach to painting can be compared to sorcery with his ability to transform his medium at will, to dilute and coagulate his pigments phenomenally, to conjure fantastic shapes into anthropomorphic beings, and to compose his creations into manners of impossibility. The portrait of the artist as shaman thus figures frequently in Martin’s work.

Gene Paul Martin’s spiritual thug lyf runs until February 6. Silverlens Galleries is at 2263 Don Chino Roces Avenue Extension, Makati City.