Martín Soto Climént - The Heart of Heaven / Blushing Paintings: Stockholm

We look forward to welcoming you to the opening of Martín Soto Climént’s new solo exhibition, The Heart of Heaven / Blushing Paintings, opening on Thursday, August 22^nd, between 17:00 - 20:00 in the presence of the artist.

 

The blushing paintings are Martín Soto Climént’s first, new series of work to be initiated after the release of the extensive monograph on his work published by Mousse Publishing in 2021. As the book was completed, he was compelled to find a new way of approaching recurring thematics and at the same time reflect on the past two decades of his work. The kinship Soto Climént’s work shares with the Surrealist movement has always been prevalent, however, the performative streak is important for him as well. In the early days of his career performance was his main practice which, as his work developed, became integrated and reworked into an interest in the performative gesture. The blushing paintings are silkscreen prints on silk fabric, where this gesture appears in the folding of the foam, which he then photographs and transfers to a silkscreen print. He perceives the printing process as a painting done in one, single gesture, as opposed to the traditionally slow process of painting. Even though the silkscreen printing technique is rooted in an industrial process created to enable repetition, Soto Climént’s focus here is rather to follow the possibility of the object than to force the process. It is about accepting what we cannot control and embrace the imperfections. When the printing process is made by hand discrepancies naturally occur, and even as motives are repeated on the canvases, an exact repetition is impossible. It is in that impossibility where beauty lies for Soto Climént.

 

Materiality has always held a strong presence in Soto Climént’s works and the silk fabric plays a part in how the viewer experiences his new paintings. As light travels over the silk fabric canvases, the colours shift and create a visual effect reminiscent of blushing - this bodily reaction entwined with contrasting states such as intimacy, shyness, or anticipation. The printed folds, which meander over each canvas, also hold a sense of intimacy: they balance on the edge between abstraction and figuration, and let the mind associate to the soft folds of the body, or to cloudy, shifting skies.

The soft palette in the blushing paintings, where two complementary tones are mixed to create a visual vibration, is derived from Soto Climént’s observations of the sky and the transitory states of sunrise and sunset. What we conceive as two polar opposites – night and day – does for a brief moment coexist and reveals itself as a single and constant movement, where both parts equally depend on the other for its existence. The intertwined relationship between dualities does at the same time contain a “oneness” which interests Soto Climént. This streak also reflects in the titles, which he sees as a path into the ideas the works contain, or keys to what lay hidden beneath. Venus, with her rich symbolic associations, is recurring in the titles of this exhibition: she here connects to both an intimate communication that goes beyond superficial beauty, as in the image of a blushing cheek, as well as acting as a contrast to other symbolic entities. In Venus y Vulcano the soft aspects of Venus are contrasted to Vulcan, her husband and the god of fire, which here becomes a symbol of the subconscious elements that relate to inner forces of human nature, or La Doncella which translates to “the maiden”, as in a pristine or virginal young lady, who just like the goddess of love is elevated and revered, albeit in a contrasting context. She is also present in Venus Solaris, as “of the sun”, and in Venus Borealis, as in “of the north” - with “borealis” also being a nod to the paintings being exhibited up north in Scandinavia, with its particular light and sky phenomena. In the end, there is an inherent energy created between these oppositional pairs, and just as night would not exist without day, the world can equally be seen as divided but at the same time whole.

 

Soto Climént was born in 1977 in Mexico City and lives and works in nearby Tepotzlan. Recent institutional solo-exhibitions include Museo de la Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico City; Hessel Museum of Art, Hudson, USA; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; Museo Pietro Canonica, Rome; Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland; El ECO Museo Experimental, Mexico City; New Jersey Museum of Contemporary Art, USA; and Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City. His work is to be found in numerous collections such as Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, USA; François Pinault Foundation, Hessel Museum, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, USA; Colección Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Loewe Foundation; MCA Chicago, Chicago.