Head VIII

Oil, steel and wood on panel, 2019
27 3/5 × 23 3/5 × 4/5 in

Daniel Martin creates his work by the deformation and recreation of matter. He casts his sculptural paintings by the mastery of chance and mistakes. His collage portraits breathe a universe of undiscovered human artifacts and transmutational structures.
Daniel lives and works in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his current work, he searches for the transmutational properties of matter. The portraits and sculptures do not have a definite form and posses different realities on how they can be perceived. In order to come to new forms, Daniel cuts up paintings, finds things on the street and uses creations made by others. The loose elements from these endeavours are used as disjointed brushstrokes that are reassembled into coherent shapes, again creating an object which holds no truth in shape.
Daniel Martin sees beauty as a construct. I guess we have been re-calibrating our perception of beauty since the first civilization. Every culture and every one of us in society has a different view on what looks aesthetically pleasing for them. For instance, look at the fashion industry where they are slowly phasing out the idea that models should be thin and advocate that it is good to have a few more pounds, like the women in the renaissance era. It is something that slowly evolves from one thing to another, or back and forth in this case.
“I have always been more interested in imperfection or deformation rather than something that looks ‘normal’. I see beauty in the abnormality of an organism or object because it becomes something we don’t see each day.”
His work has been published and exhibited nationally and internationally. Exhibitions include the national museum of revolution, Cuba; Duo Phillip Akkerman, Sis Josip Gallery, Den Haag; Havana Biënnale (collaboration with Karang (Karina Alonso); I never lost you, Kunsthuizen, Leiden; Vigour, Den Gallery, Kuwait.