Cameron Martin: Eclipse

Concurrent exhibition at Eleven Rivington

Greenberg Van Doren Gallery and Eleven Rivington are pleased to present Eclipse, a two-venue exhibition of new paintings by Cameron Martin. Both locations will have work on view from November 15, 2007 – January 5, 2008. A catalogue, featuring an essay by Andrea K. Scott, will accompany the exhibition.

Martin’s paintings engage issues of perception as they relate to imaging of landscape. Eight medium-to-large scale works will be featured at Greenberg Van Doren, all made in 2007. Rocky terrain and calcified trees are rendered in what appears from a distance to be nearly perfect black and white photo-realism. The apparently nocturnal images require protracted viewing in order for the eye to adjust to their smoky pallet, and at a close range the pictures break down into fragments evocative of digital imaging. The work promotes a sense of non-specific nostalgia, referencing images of the past, but also alluding to the uncertainty of the future. As artist and writer Dike Blair writes in a recent BOMB Magazine article:

“These paintings, like all of Martin’s, are steeped in romanticism; yet just as clearly they are products of an analytic eye and mind, and a trained and restrained hand. His paintings are very much of our time but flirt with history painting and sci-fi futurism. As in earlier bodies of work, here there’s the time embedded in the geological subject matter and the aforementioned time implicit in the making of these things. But in this work, there’s an added dimension of time that arises from the controlled cross-referencing between photography and painting.”

At Eleven Rivington, Martin will present the multi-part painting Arbital. Three medium-sized acrylic on canvas panels feature seemingly similar images of a dark rock outcropping. Each work is painted in over a dozen shades of black and grey, and with time their chromatic and optical shifts become dramatically clear. It is a succinct and beautifully staged proposition, activating our perception of light, space and time, as well as provoking questions about singularity, seriality, and the role of the copy in the image world.

Born in 1970, Cameron Martin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He was educated at Brown University and The Whitney Independent Study Program. He has exhibited widely in the United States, Europe, and Japan and was included in the critically acclaimed 2004 Whitney Biennial. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at The St. Louis Art Museum and The Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, as well as the upcoming group exhibition In Monet’s Garden, originating at The Columbus Museum of Art and traveling to the Musée Marmottan, Paris. His work is in the collections of the St. Louis Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Seattle Art Museum, among others.