CreArt ARTIST SIMON MARTIN SELECTED FOR THE AiR PROGRAM UMĚNÍ VE MĚSTĚ (ART IN THE CITY) HOSTED BY ČESKÉ BUDĚJOVICE (CZ)
The Curator Committee in festival Umění ve městě (Art in the City) announces the selection of the CreArt artist, Simon Martin for the Residence hosted by České Budějovice 2028 between may June.
SIMON MARTIN
Born in 1993 in Vichy, Simon Martin lives and works in Auvergne. Before studying at La Cambre, the ERG, and the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee, Simon Martin grew up in the Puy-de-Dôme department (63).
Immersed in a world where effort and hard work set the pace of life, Simon Martin creates machines — pieces of metal gathered here and there— that take shape through welding. Somewhere between archaism and low-tech, these sculptures question utility and necessity. Whether absurd inventions or alienating tools, everything is on a human scale and just waiting to be activated. In a different format and through various mediums, a narrative that can be read as an instruction manual symbolizes scenes of wandering that leave a trace of their use. Simon Martin draws spontaneously and definitively, embracing error and imperfection, seeking to embrace serendipity. In the manner of cave paintings, his illustrations — composed of paint, felt-tip pen, or engraving — depict moments of life we seek to keep in memory.
His work takes the form of scenes that bring together three elements: minerality, wandering, and the machine. Minerality is most often present through its absence, manifested in containers, tools of movement, and their representations. The wanderings are narratives, fictions in which representations of asexual, agender human beings select, move, transport, and collect these minerals. The machines, like tools, are built to enable movement or simply interaction with these minerals.
Through this experimentation with numerous mediums, Simon seeks to question the notion of utility. These machines and their hollowed-out containers illustrate the absurdity of this necessity for movement. In this aesthetic of fragility, where everything seems wobbly and misshapen, the human figure appears through bodies straining, bending under the weight of their existence. Trapped in this archaism, they are prisoners of their labor.
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