MARTIN PEARCE | TRACES/TRACINGS

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Martin Pearce, "MERCURY & LEAD," 2010

oil on canvas, 72" x 54"

Opening: Saturday, March 4, 2017 2:00 - 5:00 pm

Paul Kuhn Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent paintings by Ontario artist, Martin Pearce. Traces/Tracing

The show Traces/Tracing first was exhibited January-May 2016 at Gallery Stratford, Stratford, Ontario. This exhibition brings together large paintings from 2010-2011 with some new smaller works.

The large paintings adopt a modernist trope, that of the reduction of organic forms (of a tree, for example that we might find in Mondrian’s work) to a matrix of horizontal and vertical lines – in these paintings those matrices become unstable grids. The lines in the paintings were made with a china marker or grease pencil and T were systematically applied and partially erased several times in order to “complicate” the network of marks; the various iterations of superimposed grid-like lines build a set of “traces” on the surface.

The smaller paintings propose a different descriptive language in contrast to the grid. Again a trace of the object appears in the fragments of incised line dealing with the particular structure of leaf and branch. Some of the images of trees are derived from art historical sources or from observational drawings made using a camera lucida.