Exhibition opening Thursday 13.03.2025, 18:00-20:00
Battling the material
- text by Vibeke Tandberg
Over the past few weeks, while watching Mickael Marman complete the works for 'hello driver,' I have realized that this guy is not only good at making pictures but also obsessed with them.
For Marman, it seems both a blessing and a curse. The intuitive and expressive nature of his paintings, which looks as if they are created impulsively or destructively, is, in fact, meticulous work around the clock. Messages and snapshots on WhatsApp, whatever hour, reveal the fact that every spot or stroke has been thoroughly considered – that every detail has been discarded, reconsidered, and altered in form, color, and material multiple times. After studio visits, emails, and extensive messaging, there is nothing about this guy that does not seem obsessive. Susan Sontag's famous quote, "Never worry about being obsessive; I like obsessive people; obsessive people make great art," also holds for me.
And still, Marman’s pictures give the impression that he does not like to paint. It is as if he opposes not only the pretentious but the articulated – as an aversion to picture-making itself. It looks like the creative process stops just before the conflicting gestures conclude, evoking the sensation of creativity abruptly severed, akin to a cliffhanger in a film. The results are destructive abstractions, where the many layers create a new language within its own logic.
MM on WhatsApp: 'The specifics of a material, it always starts with a certain material, whether it is Africanized plastic bags' (read: fake Gucci, fake Louis Vuitton, fake, you name it) 'or tote bags from Morocco and newspapers from Germany.' Me: 'And now?' MM: ' Photos from Jamaica. I mostly implement material I find interesting, often within a diasporic context.' (Marman always travels and then paints when he comes home, wherever home may be.) Me: 'Printed on newspaper?' MM: 'Because of the materiality.'
Despite the materiality, you could say, as Marman seems set to battle whatever material he works with. His approach is imbued with an anti-aesthetic ethos, as if the paintings are ambivalent to themselves. A reviewer wrote after an exhibition in Brussels in 2021: 'In the end, it is simple: if we don't understand artistic practice as something other than products we visually consume, we don't come to terms with Marman.'
In 2016, Marman documented his travels in Gambia, his father's homeland, through diary entries in the form of emails addressed to himself. In one, he conveys doubts about his ability to keep a genuine connection to the material: 'Maybe I should have focused more on the description of the landscapes, or certain people or music I'm hearing by now, but to be honest ... that would drench this in clichés and stereotypes. I'm less interested in it, and it would also completely fuck up the difficult word-honesty in even writing this, wouldn't it? I will answer this myself in a later mail, to me, myself, I ... can I describe myself?'
The difficult word-honesty–that terrible materiality of the surface that Beckett lamented–appears as a battle with materiality running through not only Marman's writings but all his works. The paintings appear as if they strive to dissolve themselves, they look like never-ending reconsiderations that buckle and curl, that are torn off and glued over and then torn off again. It is layering to conceal rather than convey a message–to fight off that terrible material honesty and reach beyond its limits. Obsessed? Undeniably. 'Keeping it real'? Inevitable; authenticity is not optional when you are obsessed; it just happens. MM: 'Limbo is good, a space between meaning. Layers of meaning, layers, it's all about layers.'
A few years back, a Washington Post journalist declared the phrase 'keep it real' politically dead. The term originated within the Afro-American music scene in the 1930s, denoting resistance to cultural influence by white America. Apart from rap music continuously stressing its realness since the 1990s, it is today predominantly a social media hashtag, serving as confirmation of authenticity in the matrix. How to be authentic in an inauthentic world? We've domesticated the term for all the wrong reasons. But still, isn't that what art is all about, reaching the bedrock – penetrating the calculated or the false to find something genuinely true?
When you get into a taxi and say, 'hello driver', it may not be out of politeness or social performance; it might be an invitation to something else.
