Painting |Martin Reyna

Martin Reyna is an Argentinian artist who is based between Paris and Buenos Aires. He works in various locations where his visual registers are driven to become painting and drawing. Atmospheric and visual conditions, often very intense light, accidents or irregularities in the field, vegetation and the action of the wind, all play a part in his paintings. However, although part of Martin Reyna's work is done outdoors, he does not seek to replicate the chosen locations. The paper supports and the use of watercolors, inks or water-based paints are a way of extending the use of sketchbooks with the intention of projecting them to another scale. As Philippe Cyroulnik points out, ‘The position he has chosen in the field of art helps us understand the way in which his painting - through color, form and light - invokes or produces a landscape; but also withdraws from it, to confront painting itself.’ He is often concerned by weather conditions, light and nature, as in Patagonia, from where the series of drawings on paper from a ‘travel notebook’ is taken. ‘A Campo Traviesa’ is an exhibition in which crossing fields or landscapes take us on a journey into an abstraction that borrows from a totally free abstract visual reality, such as that undertaken by the artists Tal Coat or Howard Hodgkin. The series of oil paintings is an exploration of ‘extreme sunlight, landscape as a vision of the human soul (Philipp Otto Runge), symbolism and the stubbornness to perceive nature’.