Lennart Martin

Lennart Martin has developed a tool within painting that brings latent tensions and underlying aspects of today’s media-produced self-representations of people to the surface—where they explode. The motifs may be taken from pop culture or from film stills. Martin does not paint his subjects using projection, but by freely redrawing them. He begins by focusing purely on light values, then adds color in a second step. The color divides the pictorial field into intense zones that sharply contrast with one another, transforming the image into something like a backlit screen, reminiscent of a laptop display. These color zones interrupt original connections, while simultaneously intensifying coherence within each zone. In the overall view of the painting, a number of antagonistically charged actors emerge, pulling the ground out from under the viewer’s feet and drawing us into a virtual realm in which not only the present, but also references to motifs from the past, begin to unfold.