Kates-Ferri Projects welcomes Uruguay born artist Martin Pelenur to New York City for an August artist residency during which he will progressively create works that interact with grids and interdisciplinary mediums. As a young artist, Pelenur mainly worked on expressionist paintings. However, he began experimenting with the idea of using square grids painted on wood to generate conditions that directly link the relationship between shape and the texture of the wood. In the residency, Pelenur will continue to construct these connections in innovative ways to his practice.
Pelenur compares the gridded canvas to visual graphics and soundwaves. Pelenur’s wood-based artworks are produced from his research on geometric shapes, which refers to the square as the number 4, positive and negative space, and intentionally using the bleeding edges from the paint lines. Pelenur has expressed the amount of discipline it takes to focus on grids and to unravel the possibilities that they can construct. Furthermore, Pelenur uses colors and layers of grids to allow the audience to inspect them and open their perspective of the grids that we live within.
Additionally, Pelenur advocates that grids are placed throughout the spaces that we occupy. In particular, New York City is filled with grids, including buildings, cityscapes, and walkways. While in his residency, Pelenur will be outside of his normal routine. He plans to connect with the neighborhood and draw inspiration from the grid structures hidden within the city. Further evolving his practice to break down the foundation of maps and the shapes that live within typography to explore his own interpretation of grids.
About the Artist:
Martin Pelenur is a visual artist and cultural producer, conducts La Pecera Artist Run Galley in La Barra Punta del Este, Uruguay since 2013. La Pecera is an independent run space who’s main goal is the further development of visual arts in Uruguay.
As an artist has an extended career which started by the end of the nineties with numer- ous shows in his country and abroad.
Pelenur's work has been exhibited in the Rio de La Plata region and abroad. It has been the subject of individual and collective international exhibitions at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Buenos Aires, the Art Nexus Foundation in Bogotá, the Figari Mu- seum in Montevideo, the Artemisa Gallery in New York and the Sayago & Pardon Foun- dation in Los Angeles. Pelenur has received numerous awards, among them the Project Bitácora of the Ministry of Culture and Education of Uruguay (2015), the FEFCA Grant of the Ministry of Culture and Education of Uruguay (2019 & 2012), the Paul Cézanne Prize from the French Alliance in Montevideo (2011), and the Goethe Institut scholarship in Berlin (2010). The artist currently lives and works in La Barra, Maldonado, Uruguay.
Artist Statement: I define myself as a Painter and understand painting as a way of thought. My artistic practice is divided in studio time where I devote myself to research the materials I use to produce Paint. I work with premises, hypothesis to test and then go to their encounter. Repetition is the methodology, just like breathing, the heartbeat, or walking, kind of a mantra, a meditative state in which concentration is total.
Outside the studio I work with the drift, mostly walking actions that take place in the countryside or the city. The starting point is cartography, reading maps until some anomaly calls attention. I study them, and then go to its encounter again. It can be a straight line, a 90 degree angle or the perimeter of an island. I’m producing an index of the walk.
My current professional activity has to do with how I divide my artistic practice. My last show had to do with a repetition series on how to produce grids placing orthogonally masking tape on a given support and my last project was to go to the border of Uruguay and Brazil and walk a 40kms artificial straight line that divided both countries.
Follow Artist on Instagram @extractorvoyeur