Juxtapoz Magazine – O happiness! happiness!: Martyn Cross is in London

Hales is delighted to announce O happiness! happiness!, Martyn Cross‘s debut solo clearly show with the gallery. The exhibition options new paintings that muse on Gustav Flaubert’s seminal book The Temptation of St Anthony.

Cross is mainly a painter engaged with ‘world building.’ The act of painting for him is a implies to explore the inner everyday living and strangeness of the normal. Just about every function begins in actuality, with recognizable limbs and things of landscape, which remodel into uncanny scenes. Biomorphic landscapes speak to mythologies, but in Cross’s paintings the narratives are knowingly ambiguous. Common and mysterious, peaceful and epic, scale and irregularity in proportion puzzles the viewer. 

Regarded for paintings which are intentionally tough to spot in historical past, there is a timelessness to Cross’s functions, reminiscent of unearthed artifacts. Paintings are built in contemplative layers the pigments keep on being vibrant – his application and exquisite use of colour results in works that hum. Sanding and scratching the area, Cross strives to make paintings that have lived a lifetime, the trace of their existence apparent. Monumental hangings speak to a heroic narrative of bigger powers, presented together with small paintings which are jewel-like and personal.

Cross has very long been fascinated by depictions of the Temptation of St Anthony throughout art background, significantly Hieronymus Bosch’s The Temptation of St Anthony* which is a single of the a lot more subdued iterations. Observing how formulaic the majority of depictions are, Cross notes a reoccurrence of ‘a wild hunting Tony’ battling with demons in physical sorts. Obtaining go through Flaubert’s Temptation of St Anthony this 12 months, Cross was struck how easily the surrealist imagery was conjured from the pages. Looking through the closing paragraph of  Flaubert’s novel Cross has likened to getting his ‘holy grail’ – the words and phrases perfectly aligning with his apply and fostered a need to make far more operate:

‘O joy! pleasure! I have noticed the birth of lifestyle, I have found the commencing of motion. The blood in my veins is beating so difficult that it will burst them. I experience like flying, swimming, yelping, bellowing, howling. I would like to have wings, a carapace, a rind, to breathe out smoke, wave my trunk, twist my overall body, divide myself up, to be inside each-issue, to drift absent with odours, develop as crops do, stream like drinking water, vibrate like audio, gleam like light, to curl myself up into every form, to penetrate every single atom, to get down to the depth of make a difference – to be issue!’

 For numerous decades, prior to reading through this affirming paragraph, Cross had been producing motifs that imbue the psychological and the otherworldly into landscapes. The works in the exhibition take The Temptation of St Anthony as a beginning level – there are no bodily manifestations of demons but relatively explorations of ideas that align with Flaubert’s spirit and personal desire in subject woven into the story. The title of the exhibition, O contentment! joy! directly rates Flaubert, delivering a wry commentary of a sought-soon after emotion, counterbalancing the darker, far more introspective themes of the paintings. Cross states, ‘I feel more than these previous few of several years, significantly with lockdown, we have all come to be a little bit Anthony…Locked in ourselves with our demons…’ Billowing clouds, swirling waves, tumbling waterfalls, arching bodies, all-seeing eyes, outsized pointing fingers and blistering suns type visions of inward reflection.