Martin Freire

Martín Freire - The Semiotics of Truth

Biografía del Artista: Seville, 1975 Martín Freire is a Sculpture major at the School of Fine Arts in Seville. His work is based on two fundamental premises. The first is the research and development of intervention tactics in exhibition spaces; the second is the importance of the idea of ​​process in his work, through which many works are presented in progress, with no possible end. In his works he develops reflective discourses around the history of Contemporary Art and where the relationships between reality and representation are strained. The symbolic character that his work acquires shows us a distorted vision of reality, resorting to motifs from his everyday context. Twisting windows, walls with vanishing planes and impossible perspectives lead us to a questioning of the visual fact, to a relativization of the media and to a cynical reference to the stereotypes of the languages ​​of art. The materials used by Martín Freire come from the industrial field and are basically composed of PVC, vinyl and adhesives, proposing a complex discourse of distancing and overcoming traditional artistic disciplines. His works combine resources from film stagecraft, graphic design and advertising, as well as references to different stellar moments in the History of Art. Martín Freire has been awarded the Neinver prize for a site-specific project for Seville (2012). In 2014 he exhibited individually at the CAAC (Seville) with a specific project for its facilities, and he received the Arte Rivera Bilbao grant for the development of an artistic project on technological applications in 2016. In 2015, he obtained the DKV Seguros-LABoral Production Grant and participated in the collective exhibition “Productions and processes in the DKV Collection” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Vigo. Seville, Spain, 1975. His work derives from two fundamental premises. The first being the investigation and development of intervening tactics – with regards to exhibition spaces; the second, being his idea of ​​the process through which his work appears to be in progress, without the possibility of being completed. His works present reflective discourses that develop around the history of contemporary art and where the relationship between reality and its representation tightens. The symbolic character that adheres to his works, manifests a distorted vision of reality, resorting to motives of his everyday environment. Twisted windows, walls of receding plans and impossible perspectives lead us to question visual fact, to a relativization of the media of communication and to a cynical reference to the stereotypical languages ​​of art. The materials used by Martín Freire descend from an industrial scope and are basically made, of PVC, vinyls and adhesives, composing a complex discourse in which the traditional artistic disciplines are overcome. His works combine previous resources of cinematographic stage mechanics, graphic design and advertisement as well as references to a variety of outstanding moments in the history of art. He was awarded the Neinver Price for a Site Specific Project in Seville in 2012. In 2014 he individually exhibited a specific project for CAAC, Seville and he received the Bilbao Arte Rivera Scholarship for the development of an artistic project with technological applications in his work in 2016 .In 2015, DKV Seguros-LABoral Production Grant and participated in the collective exhibition "Productions and processes in the DKV Collection" at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Vigo.

From critical positions that do not exclude either the global denunciation of sociopolitical reality or a caustic contextual look at the artistic environment, Martín Freire's work appears 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 ethereal advertising content and messages, already unintelligible, obsolete, swallowed up by the vertigo of constantly renewed information and the speed of technological transit. Worn, used remains of physical and static supports that stood in the urban territory as landmarks and beacons of diffusion and announcement of unquestionable truths and models of life. Surplus construction, plaster, cardboard, galvanized steel profiles, PVC pipes, wooden formwork, polycarbonate sheets or glass cuttings as transport materials, and the deception of artistic artifice, a trompe l'oeil that transforms foam board into a marble imitation, serve the creator to build open structures, assemblies of weak fixings that, in their building and architectural zeal, show the unwelcoming reverse of the illusory superficiality with which all capitalist discourse is invested. Martín Freire recombines 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 atmospheric setting, aware of the essential and inherent condition of stagecraft that art has for the market today. Loose letters, disassembled images, decontextualized advertisements serve to recompose a new language that no longer aims to convey a message but rather aims to reveal the precariousness of our daily lives, the inconsistency of all belief and security through the fragmented monumentalization of banality. In contrast to the romantic idea that considered ruins as a melancholic suggestion of a mythological time, of an age of divine heroes and overly mundane gods, the remains represent for the artist the opportunity to warn the spectator in his confrontation with a present time in which secular values ​​and critical capacities are diluted in frivolous triviality, the ontology of presentism, the dictatorship of technological obsolescence and the algorithms of capital. And he does so through the artistic experience, in a process of active and dynamic immersion of the spectator in the proposal that has much of a revealing purification, one of the few mechanisms still plausible to undertake such an enterprise. Text: Iván de la Torre Amerighi.