"The painting of Fabien Martinet is at the junction of Orient and Occident. In 1987, he discovers the medium of painting in Academic Art studies. He is soon influenced by Asian philosophy. His painters of reference come from Informal Art and Lyrical Abstraction.
For Martinet, the act of painting is primordial. He gives priority to motion and signs. He works through a series of fluid and sweeping movements. These spontaneous gestures give to the surface an expressivity and bring to the forms their turbulences. His paintings are directed by rhythms and transformations or in the words of the writer Jean Paulhande: by a growing metamorphosis. It is energy in balance that is transmitted to the surface.
And yet, at the opposite of classical Chinese painter, he does not intent to represent the visible world. Instead of showing real landscape, Fabien Martinet leads us in intangible places through canvases where there is no need to show human figures. He does not start from sketches to achieve a final piece. His work does not stem from the meaning to build up the sign but from the sign to access the meaning.
If those traces may sometimes appear figurative or comparable to natural shapes, it is that there is a correspondence or equivalence between certain psychological contents and natural phenomenon. Internal rhythms find their expressions in the movement of the landscape. We may perceive a wave or a mountain but another interpretation imposes itself. We may perceive some anxiety in a scratched line or a fissure but they disappear in stoke of color and the interpretation vanishes with them.
Not only, Fabien Martinet painting does not give any information determined by the nature or a choice of signs, but it does not allow any fixed interpretations. Instead of informing, it allows infinite interpretations. This is an open work that the viewer can read without hindrance." … Read More