Glenn Martinez solo art exhibition
16 September to 15 October, 2022
Kalyehon Cafe | 15square Art Gallery
147 Legaspi-Sañez St., Medicion 2-A, Imus, Cavite (in front of Gov. DM Camerino Elementary School)
📍 Waze/Google Maps: Richard Buxani Sculpture Studio
GALLERY HOURS: 1:00 pm to 10:00 pm daily, except Wednesdays
The Precarity of Flight
By Jose Santos P. Ardivilla
Glenn Martinez’s works in the Winged Victories exhibition show us the ways flight has been part of our collective imagination through the ages. However, in Martinez’s assemblages, flight is not ordinary as just soaring into different heights, but, crucially it is giving direction, and marking distance. Though it might be easier to see his works as ornamentation, but ultimately, these are carefully crafted visions of flight and the possibilities of luring the viewer’s imagination to different tangents flying through the air.
People take for granted flying now with the crush of cheap air fares and wanton crass tourism that rendered flight as a means for a hashtagged instagrammable picture of conceit. Martinez renders the old magic associated with flight in his pieces. The old magic is the precarity or uncertainty of flight; it is when one is perched in the precipice ready to jump not really knowing if one will soar or flounder. That moment of tension between grounding and taking off are the tales whispered in between the spaces these assemblages tell. Fused with disparate materials, Martinez’s works point out that for human experience and human imagination are results of acts of assemblage.
It bears mentioning that the materials used are usually seen as discards that belong to refuse bins that are decidedly grounded. Martinez gives them a new life, a new meaning, a new attachment, a new way of being looked upon. Such is an act of flight, of elevation. The precarity here is that in flight, one does not stay in place in the air but have to navigate thought turbulence and terrain; one moment hovering, the next plummeting. It is an act of force and will to keep on flying. Martinez’s approach gives his materials this continuous sense of flight, of elevation. His assemblages are various glimpses of flying, the possibility of flight, and the danger of plummeting.
After all, flight is not a monolithic experience – it can be a playful flight of fancy and it can be, like Icarus, a willful soaring to one’s doom. Yet, be it soaring or diving, flight involves verticality in which Martinez employs in his assemblages. It cannot be faulted if one were to see some similarities with Church retablos, even Church santos that are visual implements of yearning for the divine. Yet, the divine can be earthy, gritty even, and this is what the inspiration of the title of the exhibit “Winged Victories,” when divine flight comes into contact with the earthiness, with us. This hearkens from the Ancient Greek Hellenistic sculpture of the Winged Victory or the Nike of Samothrace.
The modern world sees this sculpture as broken perched upon the grand staircase at the Louvre in Paris. Her brokenness of having missing limbs and head do not lessen the work’s force of its moment of flight with its outstretched wings as the folds of her tunic pulsing on the flesh – the sheer lightness and airiness captured despite the weight of a very earthy material of the marble. In its original location, the sculpture is not stand-alone but a part of a fountain fixture in which her feet ouch the streams of water and this creates an illusion as if she is coursing through the tides leading victoriously the prow of a magnificent boat. Yes, the Nike of Samothrace was an assemblage. She is not merely soaring, but she is the very point of contact between divinity and earthiness – an assemblage demonstrating forceful glory cutting through the elements, through history, through imagination, and through the ages.
Such is the legacy that can be gleamed from Martinez’s opus of works that show the different precarity of flight. The uncertainty allows playfulness of possibilities of assemblage. This renders flight as fluid and in constant flux. Though his works may seem to be stable, unmoving, Martinez challenges us to take another look, a deeper gaze into his works, and perhaps a chance to let his pieces take flight in our minds.
