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aeroplastics
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contemporary |
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Martin Richman
PRIMING VISION |
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Martin Richman works with light, altering the viewers sense of space through radiating an environment with an ambient, chromatic light field. |
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The experience of that space is rendered more intense and edges the viewer towards what the artist calls a perfectable space which we know is there but we are unable to physically attain. |
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A commission for the lobby of a theatre/concert hall complex, in collaboration with architect Nicholas Thompson of Renton Howard Wood Levin. The name Le Shona Habo makes reference to a mythical time and place of contentment. The whole piece very slowly changes colour, and the windows and the slit at the centre provide glimpses into a seductively lit interior space. Divided into two parts, one upstairs, one down. MDF, glass, fluorescent tubes. The first floor piece, as illustrated, is 2.4m high. (The ground floor piece is 3m high). |
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 Untitled (1993) |
It would be tempting to slip into metaphysical rhetoric in seeking to elucidate the impact of Richman’s work. There are clear analogies between his work and that of artists who profess an interest in the Sublime and who unashamedly discuss their work in relation to spiritual aspirations. |
 Bethnal Railway Bridge London (1995) |
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But Richman wiscly avers this kind of discourse preferring to limit himself to the language of perceptual experience. He talks of "space", maximum retinal impact and other words derived from the world of our senses. | ||
| But he does not wish thereby to suggest that the meaning of his work rests simply in an intensification of the physical coordination of the here and now. In talking of perfectable space Richman is indicating that the aim of his work is to move the viewer beyond purely physical coordinates and into a transcendant space which while unrepresentable the artist nevertheless believes exists. |
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It is furthermore a characteristic of the artist's work whether it is in large scale projects such as his interventions on the exterior appearance of a Birmingham Power Station or a smaller gallery-based installation and individual wall based work that access to this "perfectable space" be fell to be in one way or another physically obstructed. |
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| The message of Martin Richman seems to be, for me, that while we remain primed for perfection we rarely actually achieve it In a visual culture which seems more and more caught up with surface spectacle Martin Richman's art implies a deeper vision. In it he stages an interface between an intensified awareness of the material world, provoked through dramatic light effects, and a luminous emotionally charged space which is sensed as existing beyond this material world. info: contact@aeroplastics.net aeroplastics homepage MARTIN RICHMAN’S BOOKSPACES |
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