"Places & Traces" marks the first solo show of Dutch artist Maarten Demmink in Paris. Following up his work on natural disasters, he presents some recent landscape paintings from the series "Earth", "Labyrinths of Clay", "Ask the Dust", "The Book of Sand" and "Urban Tissue".
Executed during the lockdown as a way to escape from the impossibility of travelling, the "Earth" series is based on satellite images gathered on Google Earth. Maarten Demmink was interested in non-touristic and deserted regions of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Arabian Peninsula where he would probably never go: Koutougou, Abéché, Gorom, Afar, Aminuis, Almansoria, Hadramaut... The flaws of these aerial views, which use the 16:9 screen aspect ratio, reduce these distant and mysterious landscapes to an indistinct and derealized set of spots and lines. Alongside, almost matterist paintings from "Labyrinths of Clay", in which vastnesses are overwhelmed by the rising waters and invaded by informel growths, evoke scenarios of climate change.
As a contrast to these images from High-Tech and scientific forecasts, the exhibition juxtaposes works from the series "Ask the Dust", "The Book of Sand" and "Urban Tissue". Displayed as a cartography, the paintings connect archaeological sites such as Qeiyafa, heritage sites in danger, the Buddhas of the Bamiyan Valley in Afghanistan destroyed by the Taliban, fantasized visions of Tuscany, former densely populated or demolished urban areas such as the Kowloon Walled City in Hong Kong... This mental and global panorama that combines past and present, real and imaginary space, human will and laws of nature, invites us to look at the world from another point of view.
The title "Places & Traces" expresses Maarten Demmink's approach: through the motif of landscape shaped by human activity, he seeks to record the instability and the invisible, the traces left by nature, time and history.
Born in 1967 in the Netherlands, Maarten Demmink lives and works in The Hague. Graduated of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, he revisits the genre of landscape and history painting in the light of his environmental concerns, using different mediums: paintings, wall sculptures, mixed media and staged photographs. Mainly showed in Europe and in the United States, his work has been awarded several prizes.
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