The artist Martin Freire presents The Semiotics of Truthhis first individual exhibition in Zunino Gallery Seville, and can be visited until Friday, April 21, 2023. An immersive installation that criticizes our consumer society and the corpses left by the expansionism propitiated by a ruthless capitalism.
The Semiotics of Truth it puts in front of the spectator the remains of the banquet to which we were not invited, the fictitious dreams in which they plunged society eager to feel powerful even though it is really subjugated by a ruthless elite. A punch in the face, to burst that bubble that blinded us at the time and now we know will condemn our future life without the right to reply, kick or mere complaint. An immersive installation that combines the power of The Destroyed Room – Jeff Wall, the atmosphere of Beauty – Olafur Eliasson and the desolate structures of Jorge Yeregui in the form of trompe l’oeil.
From critical positions that do not exclude either the global denunciation of sociopolitical reality or a caustic contextual look at the artistic environment, the work of Martín Freire manifests itself as an ambivalent vehicle that makes visible the remains and traces of the hypertrophied processes of global communication. in today’s consumer societies. Traces of some ethereal content and advertising messages, already unintelligible, obsolete, swallowed up by the vertigo of information in constant renewal and the speed of technological transit. Worn, used remains of some physical and static supports that rose in the urban territory as milestones and beacons for the dissemination and announcement of unquestionable truths and models of life.
Surpluses of work, plaster, cardboard, galvanized steel profiles, PVC pipes, wooden formwork, polycarbonate sheets or glass cutouts as hauling materials, and the deception of artistic artifice, trompe l’oeil that transforms foam board into imitation marble, they serve the creator to build open structures, assemblies with flimsy fixings that, in their building and architectural desire, show the unwelcoming reverse of the illusory superficiality with which all capitalist discourse is invested.
Ivan de la Torre Amerighi
Martín Freire recombines the systems of signs and symbols to, from a theatrical and scenographic conception of artistic intervention, transform any exhibition space into a continuous installation that does not renounce the atmospheric setting, aware of the essential and inherent condition of staging that holds the art for the market today. Single letters, exploded images, decontextualized advertisements serve to recompose a new language that no longer intends to convey a message but rather aims to reveal the precariousness of our daily lives, the inconsistency of all beliefs and security through the fragmented monumentalization of banality.
Opposite to the romantic idea that pondered ruin as a melancholic suggestion of a mythological time, of an age of divine heroes and excessively mundane gods, the remains represent for the artist the opportunity to warn the spectator in his confrontation with a present time in the in which secular values and critical capacities are diluted in frivolous triviality, the ontology of presenteeism, the dictatorship of technological obsolescence and the algorithms of capital. And he does it through the artistic experience, in a procedure of active and dynamic immersion of the spectator in the proposal that has a lot to do with revealing purification, one of the few still plausible mechanisms to undertake such an undertaking.
Ivan de la Torre Amerighi