Between the Lines
Carolyn Martin
GALLERY I
October 11 – November 10, 2019
Opening Reception: Friday, October 11, 6-8pm
A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce Between the Lines an exhibition of new charcoal and conte crayon works on paper by New York Member Artist Carolyn Martin. The pieces presented in the show are a continuation of Martin’s research into the potentialities of a continuous, uninterrupted, layering graphite mark to produce depth within the paper. They continue her concern with interpreting how interacting lines can tell a story — some of the lines floating and barely indicated, others black with intense, raw power, still others evaporating into smoke. If Paul Klee said “a line is a dot that went for a walk”, then the dot that Martin begins her complex compositions with takes what Lou Reed later called “a walk on the wild side.”
In her previous exhibition, Carolyn Martin explored pure line, varying its direction, flow and emphasis. The effect was powerful but spare. In her recent drawings, she layers line on line, crossing and converging, thickening and thinning them in a way that suggests dimensional forms in space, though not yet part of any familiar world. Her gestures, repeated and in very close proximity to the piece of paper that host them, are made visible to the viewer as the direct traces of the presence of the artist’s hand. Evidence of how it moved and where it fell, the automatic immediate actions that prompted the mark. Though the results are abstract at first view, Martin invites the viewer to create their own visual image from the object on the page, turning the abstraction to imagined figuration.