Exhibition

Roadworks by James Martelli

9 Jan 2009 – 31 Jan 2009

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The Old Sweet Shop

London, United Kingdom

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  • Bus: 39
  • Tube: Southfields (District Line)
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Roadworks by James Martelli

About

This show consists of narrative paintings and graphic work in which roads and their environs are used as a stage. The protagonists in this drama include cars, scooters, other engines as well as the people who use and destroy them. Transparency, and a sensation of heat are used to find parities between bodies and engines, and in the larger paintings bitumen, a component of tarmac chemically very similar to crude oil, is used as a medium. James is interested in these landscapes, objects and themes partly because he is literally surrounded by them and can observe them first hand every day but mainly because they function for him as metonym and metaphor for broader and deeper subjects. They form an intersection between the banal and the mythical. A love for fuel, speed, and engines is something the artist is conscious of in himself and is present both in the everyday experience of driving and, in a more exaggerated form, the evidence of joyriding one occasionally comes across in London in the shape of burnt out carcasses of scooters and cars. This love or lust and the iconography of engines and roads serves him as a metonym for our economy and politics. We are driven by our need for oil and energy, the engine is the hub of our economy, roads are the arteries of our body and to consume and squander is our code. James has no interest in passing any judgement on this although he seems to find it hard not to revel in it. Some of the images in the show operate as metaphor for more abstracted themes, as is the case with the two large paintings of a motorway and of people laying tarmac. Viewed from the side a motorway can be seen as a kind of timeline. This is partly because we are in the habit of equating lengths of road with a duration, namely the time taken to cover it, but also because some of our major routes follow older, even ancient migrations and conquests. It is this latter aspect of the road as an image for history that my painting is concerned with. In this context the tarmac layers of the other large painting take on a heroic stature as guardians and architects of history and progress. Although the implication carried by global warming, that our appetites for speed and energy are self-consuming, casts an elegiac shadow over the image. James' work owes a debt to the many great graphic artists who have worked for the cult British science fiction comic 2000AD

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