Jerry Martin

Bogotá, Colombia, 1976

            Over nearly twenty years of professional activity, Jerry B. Martin has developed the cross-disciplinary project La Máquina de Escribir (The Typewriter). While the work is linked to the singular creative experience of rewriting for image formation, he also paints and creates performances and installations, and his work has been exhibited in museums around the world. Martin graduated with a degree in painting from the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Corriente Alterna. Ever since those formative years his work reveals a social critique.

            He began his career using old typewriters, transcribing and drawing images from theoretical texts. Blue Pieces, his first solo show, was a series born from emblematic works of contemporary art that had the distinction of having been rejected by the public. Martin reconstructed them with his very own form of transcription and overlapping of texts, in a maneuver that broadens the aesthetic and symbolic experience. "Writing over the written, planting new words over the previous ones, overriding them and creating an image that could also be considered a metaphorical translation of the essence of the book," he says.

            In the transcriptions he makes, the text is rearranged in such a way that it becomes illegible. Thus, he reproduces ad infinitum phrases, sentences, words, mixing serial work with innovation. In a unique alchemy, he creates, through reproducibility, new forms. For him, to read is to write, to write is to draw, and to draw is to reproduce.

            Blue Pieces features the piece “Renewal & Destruction Walther PPK”. The image shows a "detective model" police pistol. The PPK was a popular weapon among the armed forces of Europe and civil society in the early 20th century thanks to its portable and concealable design.

            In working with the machines, Martin not only creates a work, but he casts a critical look at the history of the most recent art, a research process that allows him to produce pieces through personal memory exercises, to which he adds the selection of texts by renowned intellectuals. In his own words: "For me, drawing those images of artists' works with the actual text of the critics reveals my need to really believe in what I am doing, because it is like believing that inside Piero Manzoni's cans there is really excrement. That's what the work is about more than anything else: believing in it; faith."