Edgar Martins | The Diminishing Present
Edgar Martins
Edgar Martins
Photofusion is delighted to present an exhibition of new photographs by Edgar Martins. The Diminishing Present explores uncertainty, flux and transition within the urban landscape. In the absence of human presence and going beyond a pure formal investigation, Martins' photographs question and challenge our relationship to, and perception of, the city.
Martins’ work constitutes a field of illusionary and fictional games, implying passages from the dimensions of art history, psychoanalysis and philosophy.
In maintaining a link with modernist drama, the artist reflects upon the tentacular modern city in continual development, and the spectacular changes in human perception and representational practices that it induces. In a study that goes beyond pure formal investigation, disparate elements catalyse and reunite new experiences of the contemporary city. In conceiving a mode of thought capable of producing an interruption of contemporary photographic praxis, Martins is able to question the involvement of various historical and contemporary studies in the field of urban representation. These are photographs positioned in the grey area of fact and fiction, reality and allegory.
"The process of mutual input and feedback between our perceptual organs and unconscious mind based on our grasp of the nuances of language is a very personal one and goes a long way to explain why our own particular view and interpretation of an artwork is so unique and singular. Martins, with his photographs of empty, banal scenes, provides the bare bones of these artworks and we flesh them out through our own unique syntheses of experience, memory and imagination." Roy Exley, 'Suspicion: Edgar Martins' Forensic Landscapes' (text commissioned for The Diminishing Present, The Moth House, 2005)
Edgar Martins is Portuguese by birth and grew up in Macau, China. He completed an MA in Photography & Fine Art at the Royal College of Art following a BA (Hons) in Photography & Social Sciences at the University of Arts London (formerly London College of Printing). He has won numerous awards including a Jerwood Photography Award in 2003 for his series 'Black Holes & Other Inconsistencies' which has toured internationally. His work is held in collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; the Museum of Modern Art and the Orient Foundation, Macau, China;The Photographers' Gallery, London.