Martin Soto Climent
22 Mar - 26 Apr 2008
MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT
"Hidden Symmetries"
March 22 – April 26, 2008
Mexican artist MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT presents his second solo show in New York since his debut CHECKMATE in fall 2006. HIDDEN SYMMETRIES is a composition of sculptural arrangements, all designed in the ‘temperature’ of a specific time re-enactment. Based in Mexico City SOTO CLIMENT generates a unique language of the found or processed object as a messenger, - of the retroactive in the contemporary, and of cultural and social meaning. His iconography and travesties of objects are rooted in his interest and admiration for classic surrealism, which was an important movement for the Left in the 30s and 40s in Mexico City.
In that sense MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT is in touché with a new generation of artists in Europe rediscovering and redefining modernist languages. Nevertheless, the family of objects in SOTO CLIMENT’s work originates deeply in the specific milieu he comes from. There is no attempt of smoothening out towards an international style, - rather a growing degree of attention to local issues.
For the first time MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT integrates into his object assemblages images of film actors, such as Pedro Armendáriz and Pedro Infante, which opens the installation of HIDDEN SYMMETRIES to the realm of spatial metaphor, a figure of projected political longing:
“They where part of the most successful generation of Mexican film in the late thirties, forties and fifties. In the sixties Armendaríz collaborated in Hollywood productions and one of his last appearances was in a James Bond movie. These actors represented the image of the Mexican dandy as a working class hero, as well as the Mexican Indian or cowboy. They were very close to the reality of the time.
They started to work after the Mexican revolution and you can see in some films the national spirit of the time. At that time cinema was the second strongest growing industry in the country after the exploitation of petroleum. The national cinema industry and its local underdog spirit were later killed by the television monopoly. Everything changed in the 60 ́s, and the politics of selling the country out started in that time. The American vision was imported and the TV heroes looked like American prototypes.
I will use this cinema story as a metaphor of what is happening now as the Mexican government is selling our main resource...the petroleum and one of the last state owned companies.
I will use a character of the androgynous working class hero as the ‘One who seduces himself’, the one who has the possibility to reproduce himself with his own resources. But not in the sense of empty vanity, more like an idea of an elliptical journey of identity.”
MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT (born 1977) lives and works in Mexico City. Recent shows: 2008 Martin Soto Climent, T293, Naples; Re-make/Re-Model, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. 2007 Vacio Contenido, Installtion at Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City; New collection presentation, Nancy & Stanley Singer, Curator: Michael Clifton, East Hampton, NY; In Apertura: Martin Soto Climent, Raphael Danke, Jennifer West, Vilma Gold, London. 2006 Checkmate, BROADWAY 1602, NY
"Hidden Symmetries"
March 22 – April 26, 2008
Mexican artist MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT presents his second solo show in New York since his debut CHECKMATE in fall 2006. HIDDEN SYMMETRIES is a composition of sculptural arrangements, all designed in the ‘temperature’ of a specific time re-enactment. Based in Mexico City SOTO CLIMENT generates a unique language of the found or processed object as a messenger, - of the retroactive in the contemporary, and of cultural and social meaning. His iconography and travesties of objects are rooted in his interest and admiration for classic surrealism, which was an important movement for the Left in the 30s and 40s in Mexico City.
In that sense MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT is in touché with a new generation of artists in Europe rediscovering and redefining modernist languages. Nevertheless, the family of objects in SOTO CLIMENT’s work originates deeply in the specific milieu he comes from. There is no attempt of smoothening out towards an international style, - rather a growing degree of attention to local issues.
For the first time MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT integrates into his object assemblages images of film actors, such as Pedro Armendáriz and Pedro Infante, which opens the installation of HIDDEN SYMMETRIES to the realm of spatial metaphor, a figure of projected political longing:
“They where part of the most successful generation of Mexican film in the late thirties, forties and fifties. In the sixties Armendaríz collaborated in Hollywood productions and one of his last appearances was in a James Bond movie. These actors represented the image of the Mexican dandy as a working class hero, as well as the Mexican Indian or cowboy. They were very close to the reality of the time.
They started to work after the Mexican revolution and you can see in some films the national spirit of the time. At that time cinema was the second strongest growing industry in the country after the exploitation of petroleum. The national cinema industry and its local underdog spirit were later killed by the television monopoly. Everything changed in the 60 ́s, and the politics of selling the country out started in that time. The American vision was imported and the TV heroes looked like American prototypes.
I will use this cinema story as a metaphor of what is happening now as the Mexican government is selling our main resource...the petroleum and one of the last state owned companies.
I will use a character of the androgynous working class hero as the ‘One who seduces himself’, the one who has the possibility to reproduce himself with his own resources. But not in the sense of empty vanity, more like an idea of an elliptical journey of identity.”
MARTIN SOTO CLIMENT (born 1977) lives and works in Mexico City. Recent shows: 2008 Martin Soto Climent, T293, Naples; Re-make/Re-Model, Sorcha Dallas, Glasgow. 2007 Vacio Contenido, Installtion at Museo de Arte Carillo Gil, Mexico City; New collection presentation, Nancy & Stanley Singer, Curator: Michael Clifton, East Hampton, NY; In Apertura: Martin Soto Climent, Raphael Danke, Jennifer West, Vilma Gold, London. 2006 Checkmate, BROADWAY 1602, NY