INGA DE MARTIN

As a painter, the through line is that reality becomes a basis to stretch from in imaginative ways. I am trying to circumvent with my paintings the prefabricated alternatives that lie between sensation and thought, senses and intellect. Abstractions are to me products of metaphysical thinking.

Painting with shellac ink on natural linen allows me to explore the principle of porosity and transparency in a painterly way. The linen shifts the tone and mood of my recent paintings, so that an almost fresco-like patina is created. To me the canvas is in a broader sense to be interpreted as a porous space of filtering between self and reality. My paintings are meant to create a momentum. When painting, I strive for something that suggests permanence. This would be something precious, since it is antipodal to everything we are humanly subjected to. My painting process is naked. Forms and colors come like the wind. It happens as nothing happens in life, but then exactly this feels like life. Painting to me is finding out what I would paint, if I don’t know until later. Each beginning of a new work I am in love with the unknown. My paintings go through a lot of changes en route to the right color, density, and most importantly rhythm and mood. Sometimes it takes a small change in one spot, almost inconspicuous and the image steers in a completely different direction and changes the whole atmosphere. I view the act of painting as a means to further my own development. It’s something my spirit really needs. It`s been a saving grace to find beauty in life. I hope that the ambiguity and abstraction of the work foster a phenomenological state in which the viewer can have a direct, unmediated experience of the work.