- Venue
- That Art Gallery
- Date
- Thursday, November 15, 2018
06:00 PM - Address
- 17 Christmas Steps, Bristol, BS1 5BS
- Location
- South West England
- Organiser
- That Art Gallery
Truth Toggle is an exhibition of new work by artist Martyn Cross. For several years his paintings have detailed unsettling edgelands populated by a mob of eccentrics. With these new pieces we are offered something more familiar yet just as curiously isolating. Strange characters dominate the paintings and drawings, seemingly in battle with their own minds. The hairy men (is it the same man?) appear lost, confused or stoned. They resemble some kind of folkloric Green Man or visionary Blakean illustration. There is something earthy and ancient and meditative about them.
What world is this and why do these artworks exist? Have they in fact just been found in a junk shop or skip around the corner? It’s as if these are forgotten creations that, once completed by their originator, were kept hidden from view never meant for public display. We do not know their purpose and are unsure where they are taking us.
“Much of what I make draws upon an endless range of differing sources – from existential fiction to Greggs pasties to krautrock – but the resulting painting will always suggest an alternate existence, an eerily familiar vision or uncanny feeling. The rabbit hole I’m looking down is kaleidoscopic and ever changing, yet perversely it remains constant and consistent. At the heart of my practice lies a blend of compulsions: a need to physically produce something with my hands; a search for truth; to feel some kind of connection to the space I exist within; to imagine other potential human existence or experience beyond what we know.”
– Martyn Cross
