Now that stocks of Karel Martens: printed matter are exhausted, we have published a short book that shows some of the uncommissioned printed work of Martens, with an essay on ‘The world as a printing surface’ by Elliman. This is very much an object-book, in which the work is not so much reproduced as bodied forth.
| availability | in print |
| published | 2004.01.01 |
| extent | 32 pp |
| dimensions | 297 × 210 mm |
| illustrations | colour pictures |
| binding | paperback |
| ISBN | 0-907259-25-1 |
| ISBN13 | 978-0-907259-25-1 |
| £17.50 |
Martens builds patterns from parts. He prints textures in time, moving his objects from place to place and capturing the traces in the image, ink by ink and layer by layer. These ‘moving’ pictures create abstraction from specific and rational shapes, while their color can be quiet or ‘sugary’ to the eye.
By studying the prints, you can pick out the blocks he builds on. These are small pleasures, but they emerge from close viewing, and ultimately the compositions are at once careful and graceful, subtle and vivid. This is refined craft with tools reinvented as toys: precision in play. In the end, these minutiae are mesmerizing.
Al Matthews, CNN Headline News, 16 August 2004
