always present: notes on hynek martinec’s new paintings

Hynek Martinec: Every Minute You Are Closer to Death, exh cat., Parafin, London, 2014

‘Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past’

TS Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, from Four Quartets

The doe lies quite still, her eye fixed. Life is leaving. Light plays around the darkness of her eye and catches the fine hairs that fringe her features. This eye is the ‘still point of the turning word’, a focal point, a zero. The doe lies upon a table with a white cloth strewn across it, her neck twisted awkwardly. Behind her are a dark wine bottle and a candle that has gone out. This could perhaps be any moment in time between the seventeenth century and the present day. 

It could be a photograph, but for the fact that the brushstrokes are there, and we can see the fine weave of the canvas. The paint has been applied with great delicacy. The chiaroscuro is subtle, the shadows deep. The brushstrokes delineating the fur of the dead dear are incredibly fine. As in a photograph taken with a shallow depth of field, the centre of the image is crisp and sharp, but elsewhere there is a lack of focus, the background rendered as a soft blur. 

As life leaves the scene is witnessed by a grinning skull propped in a corner. Yet this is not a venerable symbol of mortality, such as St Jerome contemplates in paintings by Durer or Caravaggio. This is a twenty-first century memento mori, Damien Hirst’s diamond encrusted platinum skull, For the Love of God, displayed on a tablet computer. This, then, is now. Yet this carefully painted composition seems also to speak of then, of long ago, a time both near and distant. The painting articulates a discomforting yet persistent truth. Its title is Every Minute You Are Closer to Death(2013).

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 Hynek Martinec’s new series of paintings are grisaille still lifes. These technically astonishing works depict carefully contrived compositions that play with the archetypes of the devotional picture and the vanitas.For example,Experience of Being Alive (2014) is a still life in the tradition of the Dutch masters of the genre, yet like Every Minute…it contains an utterly contemporary object from the twenty first century, a digital radio. You Will Become As My God(2013) depicts a complex still life before a vague interior space. The composition includes not only flowers, bread and a crab, but a party balloon. The whole is distorted with shaving foam and pierced by an arrow like a strange St Sebastian. The setting is an abandoned dancehall.

33 Years of Armageddon(2013) is based on a life size plaster Jesus that the artist saw in Brixton Market. What does it mean to find such a religious symbol in such a profoundly secular place? Observing the statue Martinec noticed that the strip lights of the store were aligned so as to give the appearance of beams of light emitting from the figure’s outstretched hands. In the painting Christ’s head is replaced with that of a stag, depicted in negative. Martinec thereby conjurs what he calls the eternal conflict between the forces of good and evil that he says characterises and defines human existence. Yet we should be wary of reducing this painting by a simplistic reading. Martinec’s vision of humanity is more complex, as befitting an artist who grew up in a country where the roiling forces of history, the push and pull of conflict, are still powerfully present in everyday life. Martinec says he uses religious symbolism as religion is a pervasive part of our daily lives. It surrounds us and permeates throughout society, a fact of life whether we choose to partake or reject. However, there is also a powerful sense in his work that Martinec is pushing beyond the surface of things, perceiving meanings and interconnections that locate profundity in mundane reality. His intense contemplation of the world through which he moves seems to allow him to perceive a spiritual life like a shadow behind everyday reality.

In Six Years of Tabula Rasa(2013-14) a dead bird lies suspended in indeterminate space before a kitsch bleeding heart symbol. This strange composition is set against a landscape, dimly perceived, that in fact represents the house in the Czech Republic where Martinec grew up. It is important to understand that Martinec’s work is suffused with autobiographical detail. Everything he paints has personal meaning. His great skill is to take these moments of personal significance and render them as universal symbols.

Speak The Truth Even Your Voice Shakes(2014) depicts a skull nestled amongst a group of objects; leaves, a plastic toy ice cream cone, an alarm clock. The skull is an object that the artist says he has a ‘relationship’ with. It resides in the art school in Broumov and he drew it many times as a student. He recently revisited the school in order to photograph this particular skull. This fact serves only to illustrate this point: that his work resonates with personal meaning, with autobiography, history and memory.  

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  ‘Out of the universal substance, as out of wax, Nature fashions a colt, then breaks him up and uses the material to form a tree, and after that a man, and next some other thing; and not one of these endures for more than a brief span.’ 

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book 7, number 23

Alongside the large–scale paintings Martinec has also made a series of smaller still-lifes. Recurring motifs in these works are candles, wax and shaving foam.

The candle is a classical symbol of mortality and in Martinec’s paintings they are almost always extinguished, often burnt down and deformed. The backgrounds of the images are redacted and replaced with intense black voids, suggestive of limitless space. When it is heated wax becomes liquid and forms strange and suggestive shapes as it hardens. In The Light is In The Next Painting I(2014) a piece of wax has been pressed against a wall but with the wall removed from the image it hangs in space like an amoeba or a piece of ectoplasm. 

A spray of shaving foam transforms the shape of a skull. In another painting it forms a ‘sculpture’ but then subsequently collapses beneath the weight of a brick. Like wax, shaving foam is a fluid and mutable substance. It can be sculpted into suggestive shapes, but with time it will lose its form and collapse, becoming nothing but a pool of soapy liquid. It can appear solid but its inevitable collapse is inherent, like the party balloon in You Will Become As My God(2013). As such it is anothervanitassymbol, albeit a very contemporary one. 

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 ‘Time past and time future / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present.’

            TS Eliot, ‘Burnt Norton’, from Four Quartets

Time is a key preoccupation for Hynek Martinec. Yet we might also say that his work evokes a sense of timelessness. Or at least of sense of simultaneous time, a co-existence. One finds in the paintings an uncanny presentness. Witness his delicate portraits painted from old photographs, such as Miss Hodges of Salem(2010), William Hickling Prescott 1850-55(2012-13) or the young boy in 1925 – 11 Years(2012-13). Martinec is fascinated by the drift between the moment in time when the camera’s shutter was released, and the present moment, when he holds the antique print between his fingers and gazes back into time. Equally, his own photographs, which form the basis for his paintings, seem to strive for a condition of age. Martinec uses the camera to hold time, and the transition of the image into paint seems to stretch out this process. One has the sense that the studio is a space in which time does not behave as it does elsewhere. It is a place where many realities co-exist.

A brief inventory of some of the objects depicted in the new paintings suggests a strange cornucopia: a crab, a digital radio, bread, brick, cotton buds, octopus, cardboard box, flowers, balloon, Buddha, skull, lemon peel, shaving foam, computer, dead bird, fish, alarm clock.

What does it mean to render these things in paint? To slowly and painstakingly layer paint onto paint onto canvas, to render a photographic image – the product of a single moment in time – including the peculiarities of focus, as a hyper-real painting? It means that time congeals around the image. It builds up on the painting like coral on a reef, or crystals upon a rock. 

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 Much is written about the life and death and life of painting. As a medium it persists, resisting the vagaries of fashion, incursions from photography, film, video, computers, the cyclical dynamics of critical discourse. Martinec is a painter and while he uses cameras and computers to create his paintings he also works self-consciously out of a great tradition, well aware of the weight of history, the millions of images that were painted before, now stacked up behind him, the availability of countless images through the internet. Yet somehow he makes paintings that speak eloquently of the past and of that very tradition, while also engaging profoundly with the present. Martinec’s work seems to offer a visual equivalent of the complex understanding of time articulated in TS Eliot’s great poem Burnt Norton, one of the ‘Four Quartets’.

Painting, and Hynek Martinec’s kind of painting in particular, it seems is uniquely equipped to render this ‘always present’.