Archive

Title:“I’m sorry. I was wrong and it won’t happen again”.

Oil on canvas.

Size: 81x65 cm.

A landscape that lies between the oneiric and surreal in which non-existent images intertwine with recognisable forms. A besuited creature, who bears an elephantine proboscis and a royal crown, looks with batrachian eyes upon the surrounding world. A mistake, a gesture.

THE FACTS

The King of Spain went to Botswana to hunt elephants when his country’s people were having a tough time. The journey was kept quiet and was only discovered as a result of the accident he suffered and his subsequent surgery for a broken hip.

This work belongs to Martín-Yebra’s series “Landscapes in a Singular Time”, which he commenced at the onset of the new century. Martín-Yebra’s series, which narrates ironically the fragments of today’s reality, simultaneously collects that magic drop of the universe that traverses the enigmatic and the fantastic. We are drawn to dream once more of the unattainable utopia that is the driving force of hope.

Employing his self-taught, solid and mature technical training while not spurning the teachings of the more significant masters, Martín-Yebra has experimented and discovered a path where imagination, actuality and sensitivity stand out in the bright and luminous development of his singular landscapes.

The Urban Landscapes series encompasses a period from 1990 to 1999.

Amalia García Rubi

(Art critic)

(...)The modern city has been viewed with an enthusiasm and an almost fanatical glorification. This recalls the Italian futurists, whose artistic and moral principles stemmed from the imperious need to “support and glorify our day-to-day world, continually and splendidly transformed by victorious science"(Manifesto of the Futurist Painters, 1910). A century on from its publication, the city is viewed more realistically with a pessimism that manifests itself in open criticism and an ironic slant. The individual who makes up today’s mass society lives, works and dreams in an atmosphere that is extremely hostile but accepted. This sense of resignation, a culmination of the dehumanising process, is transmitted to canvas through the representation of a tangling of “flesh, sheet metal, plastic and concrete”.(...)

(...)Yebra lends his works an incredible dynamism.(...)

(...) He employs the decomposition of reality through the construction of a linear framework that breaks mass and space down into a multiplicity of irregular prismatic planes and the continuous use of disconnected perspectives.(...)

From an article in the magazine Critica de Arte, April 1992

Title: Zebra crossing nº 002

Oil on canvas. 116x89 cms.

Antonio Morales

(Editor of the magazine Correo del Arte and art critic)

(...) If an artist’s personality is affirmed through his/her special form of expression, of transferring a world of images to the canvas with emphatic freedom, we find this virtue in Martín Yebra. This is because his plastic language is eminently specific, lacking in prior references, and it is from here that analysis should proceed.(...)

The premonitory nature of this painting makes it unsettling. The work is constructed through a structured drawing (using certain premises of earlier Analytic Cubism). It is supported in colour to elaborately and descriptively accentuate the severe visions that the artist intends, with his interpretative originality, to be an appeal to Humanity’s conscience.

From an article in the magazine "Correo del Arte" Madrid, 1992

Title: Western street.

Óil on canvas. 61x42 cms.

Private collection

Javier Rubio Nomblot

(Historian and art critic)

(...) Martín Yebra’s exhibition of paintings produces a positive impression as soon as one sees it. It has that happy feeling of being created with pleasure, that clean smell given off by light-filled, spontaneous and transparent painting. To define this work, it is fair to say that it is related to the Orphists or Futurists, although it incorporates more modern discoveries, principally with regard to strokework and graphic art. (...)

(...) The kinder side of the city, if it exists, does not appear. The artist has restricted himself to morphological analysis in its most visible aspects. (...)

(...) this drawing, which on occasions possesses a calligraphic element or brings to mind Chinese writing, lies the secret of these paintings. They are in turn a rational analysis of a city’s image and a geometric translation of chaos. (...)

From the article " YEBRA, LA CIUDAD Y LA MATEMÁTICA DEL CAOS" (Yebra, the City and the Mathematics of Chaos) in El Punto de Las Artes. Madrid, July 1996

PARALLEL WORLDS AROUND A TURRET

Title:Tiferet (Beauty)

Oil on canvas, 61x46 cms.

One day in spring, in the mid-1990s, my attention was drawn by the decorative turret that crowns the facade of the ABC Building on the Paseo de la Castellana in Madrid. I spent some time studying it from different angles and also examined the rest of the building and those next to it. A few weeks later, I did a drawing on a canvas primed with a Martian red. Needless to say, I had no intention of doing a faithful reproduction of a scene. Rather, it was what remained in my mind after some time had passed. I had painted a memory. The image of the memory had changed substantially over a short time and was not just of the turret but everything that surrounded it.

When we focus our attention on a picture, we perceive it naturally as the only reality possible, without stopping to think that attention is continually in flux. We can focus this on an object or on a group of objects; we can jump from point to point or take in a larger field. Therefore, we form a sort of mesh that captures all the perceptions. If we add the time factor to this three-dimensional image, the mesh is transformed by the effect of memory and enables a new general perception of what surrounds us and instead of fixed, delimited objects we discover energy in movement; objects are not where they should be, new ones appear and we become aware of other realities that are hidden from our senses, of other possible universes.

This led me to commence a series of experiments, in which the passage of time and the perception of the memory form the basis for my creation of what over time became a project: the Towers series.

Many years have passed since that spring day and there are now many versions or different perceptions of that distant memory. It stays in my mind, unstoppable and changing, like an infinite whirlwind.

As I create a new work, I increasingly think that I might be painting a parallel world, in an unknown time.

Title: Sefirot (Spheres)

Oil on canvas, 61x50 cms.