Martí Cormand: Fuera de Lugar

Espacio Mínimo presents the third solo exhibition by New York-based artist MARTÍ CORMAND. The exhibition, Fuera de Lugar (Out of Place), continues to delve, from the subtle and barely perceptible, into recurring themes in his work: displacement, change, relocation, migration…

Art works that are located in a kind of non-place where the distance between the inhabited space and the abandoned space becomes a stage for fortuitous encounters, where objects are painted on other objects, as in a continuous trompe l’oeil: a folding table painted on a folded cardboard or a bar of soap painted on a book cover… A simulacrum in which the object, the painting and the represented image relate to each other until they become confused.

A poetics that stems from the concept developed by Marcel Duchamp in a series of observations that, under the title of the “infrathin”, the artist grouped to describe barely perceptible and ephemeral phenomena, elevating this term to an artistic category that captures that which is “almost nothing” and which cannot be measured or weighed, but can be felt. The presence of the absent in the remnants of absence.

Thus, in this game of simulations, Fuera de lugar is the mark left by a chair on the carpet, two mismatched shoes, the trompe l’oeil of a stolen and never-recovered Vermeer frame, or the works evacuated from museums in wartime contexts, since heritage is often the target of attacks aimed at erasing the adversary’s cultural identity. It is also the title of the memoir by the intellectual Edward Said, a recapitulation of the themes that have occupied his life, such as forced displacement, dispossession, and internal exile. And it is, finally, the place occupied by the artist, observing from the margins.