SIMON MARTIN

Born in 1992 in Vitry-sur-Seine, France
Works and lives à Paris, France
https://www.simonmartin.fr/

Simon Martin’s pictorial work is built on the recovery and resurgence of details, evoking the contemporary world and intimacy. « Simon Martin lays on the canvas, the substance of what he loves. People, flowers, the rest, share the same languidness, recorded on surfaces with chalky ranges, with a thoroughly mineral sensuality. Through painting, he transforms the moment into imagery, using a fiercely photographic strategy, to do with writing through light.» (Joël Riff)

Simon Martin graduated from the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 2017 and studied at the Royal School of Fine Arts in Copenhagen in 2016. He is the Laureate of the Bertrand de Demandolx-Dedons Portrait Prize 2017 awarded by Les Amis des Beaux-Arts. In 2019, he took part in the Émerige Révélations as well as the Antoine Marin Prize.

In autumn 2025, Simon Martin will present his first solo exhibition in China at the ICICLE cultural space in Shanghai on the invitation of Myriam Kryger.

His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Jousse Entreprise gallery in 2023 and 2020, at the FIAC fair at the Grand Palais Éphémère in 2021, and at Peter Kilchmann gallery in Zurich in 2023. Simon Martin has also taken part in group exhibitions in France and abroad, most recently at Château La Coste in Le Puy-Sainte-Réparade, MO. CO in Montpellier, the Musée des Sables d’Olonnes, the Musée Estrine in Saint-Rémy de Provence, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Dôle, the MUCEM in Marseille, and the Fondation Pernod-Ricard in Paris; and internationally at the Artissima fair in Turin (Italy) and the Material fair in Mexico City (Mexico) in 2024. In September 2024, on the invitation of Thomas Levy-Lasne, his work was exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay on the occasion of the Jour des peintres (Painters’ Day), where he was one of 80 contemporary French painters to meet visitors.

Simon Martin’s work joined the Agnès b. collection for contemporary art in 2019 and the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris in 2021.

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Simon Martin’s paintings are the result of careful observation of certain details from his daily environment, or works to which he is connected to by a feeling of empathy. It is a slow process of impregnation, similar to the way that a recording device absorbs what is visible to then restore some carefully ripened, carefully chosen fragments. The pictorial texture is light and soft, seemingly perceived through a filter that attenuates the brightness of colors in order to protect one’s eyesight from damage. The figures are shadows, arising from the surface of the plane of the canvas as if they came from the surface of a porous, rain-washed wall. There exists, too, the the idea of masking, of an ellipse of elements, things invisible yet present under the paint, which covers them tenuously. The visible is but strengthened by this, like the tip of an iceberg whose whiteness glitters on the horizon. That which reveals itself is thus linked to that which escapes the gaze, these two states melted into a gray muralism modulated by minute variations of blue or pink. It is a painting of nuances elaborated between the almost nothing and the almost everything, a suggestion of images thought of and shaped by the collisions between memory and the present, present perceptible through a door, a piece of furniture from Ikea or the evoking of a face, indications of a reality assimilated to a mental and physical situation. From this situation which is that of a conscience, Simon Martin develops a subtle art, pictorial translator of the presence of objects and beings, a presence as dis- creet and precise presence as the shaking of a leaf stirred by the breeze.

Marc Desgrandchamps, 2018

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