Carl Marthom, Continuous Art movement
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I was born in 1963. I have been painting since the age of 30 and I have always been drawing.
Deeply influenced by the aesthetics of ancient times, I try to defend a forgotten part of contemporary art, which remains away from the official scene, where all conceptual art too often anticipates everything, and where painting is avoided. It is for this reason that I campaign under an artist pseudonym, my functions as a senior executive of a well-known institutional scientific establishment prohibiting me from any dissonance.
Official art bothers me, because the ideology of rupture reigns supreme there. The official actors of contemporary art have reinvented academicism. A radical academicism that is much more fundamentalist than that which the Impressionists encountered before creating the Salon des Refusés. I wonder if this conception of art will survive common sense and good taste for much longer...
I am convinced that Art must assume and claim roots. Whatever the links with what was done before: artistic movements, civilizations, great and “little” masters, subjects and colors, all those, famous or not, who have already sealed their aesthetic marks in memories. This approach is not a desire to promote remake, recast or copy, but a real exploration of new, unknown branches. Exploring has been a constant of humanity since the deepest of ages, which will end with it. The ruptures that conceptual art establishes as a single truth claim to chart a new path. It's just. But it will quickly find its limits, because it escapes all common sense. Quite simply because for most of these works, the textual explanation is essential to find meaning, when there is one. I'm not even talking about aesthetics, declared old-fashioned, discredited. This is not what people expect from Art. The permanent desertion of the public from most contemporary art centers demonstrates this unequivocally.
Even if the price levels are artificially inflated, I wouldn't be surprised if these rootless, soulless works of art fade into future memory. The people who promote this conception of art are no longer capable of marveling at a flower.
I imagined the title Art Continu to designate this resistance movement, with the aim of giving visibility to these universes which are now dissident from other contemporary art: that which needs no explanation.
Carl Marthom
Deeply influenced by the aesthetics of ancient times, I try to defend a forgotten part of contemporary art, which remains away from the official scene, where all conceptual art too often anticipates everything, and where painting is avoided. It is for this reason that I campaign under an artist pseudonym, my functions as a senior executive of a well-known institutional scientific establishment prohibiting me from any dissonance.
Official art bothers me, because the ideology of rupture reigns supreme there. The official actors of contemporary art have reinvented academicism. A radical academicism that is much more fundamentalist than that which the Impressionists encountered before creating the Salon des Refusés. I wonder if this conception of art will survive common sense and good taste for much longer...
I am convinced that Art must assume and claim roots. Whatever the links with what was done before: artistic movements, civilizations, great and “little” masters, subjects and colors, all those, famous or not, who have already sealed their aesthetic marks in memories. This approach is not a desire to promote remake, recast or copy, but a real exploration of new, unknown branches. Exploring has been a constant of humanity since the deepest of ages, which will end with it. The ruptures that conceptual art establishes as a single truth claim to chart a new path. It's just. But it will quickly find its limits, because it escapes all common sense. Quite simply because for most of these works, the textual explanation is essential to find meaning, when there is one. I'm not even talking about aesthetics, declared old-fashioned, discredited. This is not what people expect from Art. The permanent desertion of the public from most contemporary art centers demonstrates this unequivocally.
Even if the price levels are artificially inflated, I wouldn't be surprised if these rootless, soulless works of art fade into future memory. The people who promote this conception of art are no longer capable of marveling at a flower.
I imagined the title Art Continu to designate this resistance movement, with the aim of giving visibility to these universes which are now dissident from other contemporary art: that which needs no explanation.
Carl Marthom