Profile Information
- Website
- http://www.edgarmartins.com
- Relationship status
- unresolved
- College / University
- Royal College of Art, London
- Program
- MA Fine Art /Photography
- Graduation
- 20 July 2002
- Member type
- Artist
- If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?
- Photography
- I am...
- At a glance, one could argue that my work deals with both the impact of Modernism on the environment and with issues pertinent to photographic representation, with photography as a process. I’d like to think that my work communicates ideas about how difficult it is to communicate.
But I also hope it goes much further than this.
I am interested in theatre, in performance, but not in the traditional sense of the word.
I am interested in recording the world’s performance of itself as a set of processes and facts. And the only way to do this is to slow down time.
That is why I often use long-exposures and, in some ways, why I use my photographic camera like a video camera.
Working in this way also allows me to capture the kinetic energy of things; this is the energy and movement inherent to all things, even static, immobile objects.
Borg’s uncertainty principle states that one has the power to change things just by mere observation.
Though I am not equipped to comment on this theory, per say, I like the doors and possibilities that it opens up: I like the idea that any given space changes, for you and you only, and every time, when you are there observing it. And if you slow down time for long enough you may just be able to capture this.
I interpret this change as a performance of space, as the manifestation of its kinetic energy.
Though my work has an apparent formalism and rigour, the process by which the images are created is everything but precise.
For so long photography has been about control. I like to relinquish some of his control.
I have always found photography to be a highly inadequate medium for communicating ideas, a subject and object of lack, if you like.
However, it is this anxiety with the medium that spurs me on to find a new visual language to work with and, I suppose, a new vocabulary from which to derive my glossary of life.
- About my artwork
- There is an absence of life, a paucity of purpose, and a sense of the uncanny that permeates the silence of these photographs, whose scenes, like a black hole, seem to have consumed all traces and signs of life. The sun has been usurped, in its absence, by a mysterious source of lighting, that pushes back the blackness of the night and we are obliged to fill in the absences that it relentlessly exposes. All that represents the ambience of a holiday beach is missing. The pervasive tranquillity is paradoxical, not calming but disturbing, discordant, incongruous, the viewer longs for the signs and symptoms of life to pump up the visual volume and superimpose the social identity of this place.
Given the paucity of clues offered, our curiosity is inevitably aroused and the detective in us begins to prowl around these scenes. Which country are we being shown here, which season could it be, spring, summer or autumn? What time of night is this? We might reasonably guess the early hours of the morning, so why the copious floodlighting? Is this a redundant film set awaiting the actors’ return, or perhaps an inanimate model in the mode of the miniature mise en scene landscapes of the American artist Michael Ashkin? The possibilities proliferate but there are always more questions than answers, always more assumed reasons than reality could hold down.
This is the flip side of Massimo Vitali’s photographs of North Italian beaches which teem with life and action where our gaze becomes satiated by detail, our eyes and our minds held firmly within the frame, here in these images our mind begins to wander beyond the frame. In an attempt to reinforce the rickety ontology of this work we are tempted to rove beyond the confines of the frame, under the red-hot glare of analysis the frame begins to melt, imagination breaks through its thwarted threshold, the party’s over and we want to find out where the revellers have gone, denied access to the social raison d’ettre of this scene we inhabit it with our own imagined populations and their narratives.
The solid blackness in these images has an air of the supernatural reinforcing that intangible yet somehow persistent presence of the uncanny – an abyss whose threshold teeters on the edge of credibility, where the indexicality of the image can only be tentatively maintained by the viewers suspension of disbelief.
The dark skies seem to offer a conduit to that whelming black void of interstellar space that signals things eternal – time is not just frozen here but eternity-touched. These scenes take on their own existence whose stillness and silence can only be suggested, a suggestion decisive enough to strongly signify a gnawing absence, an overwhelming sense of the melancholic. The sober and solemn reflections that haunt us after the euphoria of the party has passed and worn off, as entropy picks at its remains, as conversations fade into memories that bridge the void, all imbue the mood of this work.”
Comment Wall (9 comments)
You need to be a member of artreview.com to add comments!
Join this network
Lola
Aproveito a oportunidade virtual para te dar os parabéns pelas fotos que tens a concurso para o BES Photo. Um trabalho espetacular.
Abraços e boa exposição amanhã na Caja Negra.
-RP