Stefan Martens is a visual artist.
A painter who combines painting,
video and digital art
into a layered performance and prints.
Stef Van Bellingen on the exhibition 'OPEN' (feb 2010):
1.
In the multifaceted work of Stefan Martens the rich tradition of painting forms a fundamental orientation and a constant source of inspiration. Since his academy years, the portrait has occupied a key position in his work. Without striving to be fashionable, his image formation is indissoluby connected to the contemporary digital era. This means that he explores and produces the image with the aid of a computer. In this way the tangibility of the paintbrush or the material nature of the paint takes on an additional virtual status. Nonetheless, the search remains classical because the artist is in essence investigating the complex effect of light on plastic forms.
2.
The surprising impact of light and the metamorphosis that form and space undergo due to it thus constitute the actual subject. What unites physical light and the digital world is instability, or more positively expressed: mobility. From the perspective of this interconnection the artist could even be described as a ‘digital impressionist’. The sequential nature of the ‘Lightprincess’ portrait series can then also be read as an analogy to Monet’s paintings with the Cathedral of Rouen as theme. Due to the constantly changing lighting a new pictorial story is created in each of his paintings. Under the influence of light and time, reality then also seems to take on a fluid, elusive identity. The attempt to integrate time into the medium of painting leads to an almost musical status – a sort of leap forward of the medium – with a basic theme and variations that arise from it.
3.
Still, in impressionist painting there is the sense that reality is inevitably approached from the outside. Today, however, it is possible to modify the reality from the inside out. The modern scientist, as well as the artist seem, under the influence of technology, to deal with the essence of existence. Musical terms such as theme and variation change in this context into concepts like genotype and phenotype. The ‘macro’ or ‘nano’-paintings of Martens play on the enormous differences in scale on which we explore reality today. Naturally, unravelling the internal generates new insights into the relation between inner or outer, internal and external. Stefan Martens symbolically depicts the breakdown of that edge, border or limit. In his portraits the trace of light opens up the contour of a face, relating it to the environment. Literally, but also figuratively, the individual consequently enters into a relation with the surrounding world.
4.
The artist often accentuates the relation between the inside and the outside with bold plastic effects. He likes discontinuity, contrast, negation and inversion. In contrast to the uniform style of present-day anime- or manga-inspired figures, Martens creates layered images. The contour of a face teems with gradations and nuances, with rough suggestions of brush strokes. In his ‘Lightprincess’ the artist reconciles the dramatic interplay of light and dark of baroque artist Caravaggio with the rococo delicacy of Fragonard. The entire operation with photo, computer, projection, painting, retouching and repetition indicates the complexity of his image production process.
5.
Stefan Martens still concentrates on the classic, traditional fundamentals of painting: spots, brush marks, colour, texture and dynamics. There is an essential revelation for him in the moment at which the spots take on a cohesiveness and can be interpreted as a meaningful form. For him this is the essence of painting. Although today this medium has various manifestations and hovers between the material nature of the classic canvas and the virtual nature of the computer. The form of presentation can be an animation as well as a canvas, photo or print. The use of analogue or digital sound accentuates the contemporary multimedia possibilities all the more. The question of what is authentic, true or false matters less for the artist. The sole and most relevant question that he asks himself is whether or not the image produced is visually meaningful.
Text: Stef Van Bellingen