SILVERLENS is pleased to announce Gene Paul Martin’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery, Constructed by Chance. In this newest body of work, Martin reflects on the chaotic metropolis he lives in.

Gene Paul Martin’s studio is a separate structure tucked deep behind a bungalow in Quezon City’s Project 8. The Projects being among the first residential subdivisions built in this sprawling city after the war. The density of street life, hand-in-hand both domestic and difficult, are front and center.

Martin, a young artist of 28, presents new paintings about this street life.

In previous shows, he made it a point to speak of making paintings that ‘mean nothing’, in the sense of freehand-meditation-internet-stream-of-consciousness paintings. We saw references to artists working within layered still lifes in landscapes; aliens; paintings of banal interiors – but all disconnected to the reality of the artist’s environs.  These tropes are gone, but he replaces them with others, closer to home, closer to the third world tropical. With curiosity and confidence, he steps out of the studio and simply, paints what he sees, but still very much with the instinct of freehand-stream-of-consciousness.

With a lite tip to Spanish colonial ex-votos, an accidental nod to Philippine social realism, and a firm grounding in mise-en-scène portraiture, the show gives us vibrant colors, geometric forms, and fragmented beasts. Deep reds, purples, and greens; lines, tetrahedrons, grids; and man-dogs and zombie children.  In this new work, megalopolis Manila, of which the densest of the sixteen municipalities is Quezon City, is seen as an ongoing wreck of humanity — the taong grasa clutching a candle for light; the young zombie against the chrome of the jeepney; the disemboweled dog with herniated testicles (or is he a man?). These creatures, maimed slowly by poverty and continued violence over generations, barely recognizable, live makeshift, but real lives. They know all too well the sick, sweet smell of fresh shit and old trash; of summer stench and monsoon sewers. Gene Paul Martin uses scaffolding and skulls as its joints, and fills in the flesh with omnipresent horror vacui of a city is stretched to its breaking point.  It is all inevitable: death as the blue print of life.  

Words by Isa Lorenzo

Gene Paul Martin (b. 1989, Manila) is a graduate of the Far Eastern University, Manila (BFA Painting, 2013). He was immediately offered solo shows at Secret Fresh Gallery and Silverlens. Since then he has had nine solo exhibitions, and several group exhibitions including one at the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Aside from Manila, he has shown in Malaysia and Taiwan. One of the more dynamic artists of his generation, Martin’s work has caught the attention of important collectors and art audiences. Aside from his practice as an artist, Martin also curates and organizes exhibitions through his platform Sampaguita Projects run out of his studio in Project 8.